The ruts cut Selborne off from the civilized world.Ī bit over two centuries ago, late in the 1760s, some letters from the Reverend White began leaving Selborne, travelling up the ruts or, as White called them, the 'rocky hollow lanes.' They headed for London and beyond. In winter, the ruts hung with ice or ran with torrents, turning their cartways into ice-slides or watercourses. Even in dry summer, timid horsemen shuddered to enter these narrow gorges, paved with slick stone. Roots twisted down from above towards shoulder height, perforating ragstone and sandstone, reaching past strange ferns and rare hellebores. Overhead hung leaves, branches, trunks, boles, taproots, whole trees of oak and beech. The ruts, ancient roads fretting ever deeper since Saxon days, ran sixteen and eighteen feet beneath the surface of the earth. But ruts and ruts alone led to the village of Selborne, 50 miles southwest of London, home to the Reverend Gilbert White. It was the age that sought to 'ransack all the globe' to know its 'innermost secrets,' as one zealot urged, the age that sought to crate all the world's creatures into boxes and box all the world's creatures into categories.

It was the late 18th century, the Age of Reason. And, by treaty with the King of Spain, came South America. To him, in similar form, by agreement with Britain's Royal Society, came North America. To him from the Swedish consulate in Algiers came-in the form of abundant samples of flora and fauna-wide stretches of northern Africa. And in Sweden, Linnaeus, system-builder to the whole natural world, sat like a spider at the center of his web. Naturalists like Thomas Pennant were herbalizing the Hebrides and Cairngorms, or sending proxies where they could not go themselves. Out rounding the globe with Captain Cook, Joseph Banks was botanizing Tahiti and Australia. It was the late 18th century, no time for a naturalist to sit stuck in the ruts of a small town in the south of England.

Birds of Selborne by Gilbert White