WHITE, GitatEnr (1720-93). An English naturalist. Ile was born July IS, 1720, at Sel borne, a secluded village of Hampshire, and grew up in Selborne, at the house known as 'The Wakes,' famous as his life-long home. Ile at tended school for a short time at Farnham, and was afterwards sent to the Basingstoke Grammar School. Late in 1739 he was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford. where lie graduated in 1743, and was elected fellow. Ordained to the priesthood, he became enrote at Swarraton, and subsequently at Selborne and Faringdon, a neighboring parish. Ile lived mostly at 'The Wakes,' which he in herited in 1763. In 1752 he was made dean of Oriel. Ile died and was buried at tielborne.
In 1751 White began a 0argc.n Kalendar, which was afterwards elaborated into a .Vatura/ist's Journal, wherein was recorded the temperature, the wind, and the weather for each day, the trees first in leaf, the plants first in flower, and the birds first to appear• or disappear. The maim scripts of these diaries, from which extracts have been published, are in the British Museum. In 1767 White made the acquaintance of Thomas Pennant, one of the most distinguished natural ists of the eighteenth century, and the two men carried on a co•respon1ence for nine years.
White's part of this correspondence and a series of letters to Daises Barrington, another natural ist, formed the basis of the famous Natural His tory and Antiquities of c"'elbor•ne (1789). The book opens with a careful description of the parish of Sell followed by quaint and lightful accounts of trees, flowers, birds, and in sects. Since this little volume ninth. its ap pearance, scores of treatises on natural history have appeared, but this alone has become a classic. Indeed, White struck the exact mean be tween science and literature. Darwin praised the Natural llistory for its accurate observa tions, and Lowell liked it because it took him out of doors. Others have been fascinated by the style, which is at once precise uml natural. Edi tions of the Natural History are numerous. Per haps the hest is that by Thomas Bell (London, 1877), who bought 'The Wakes' in 1840. The standard biography is The Life and Letters of Gilbert White of Selborne, edited by his great grandnephew, Rashleigh Holt-White (London, 1901).