Quotes by Gilbert White

• The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
• You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not leave this country in the winter.
• We have had a very severe frost and deep snow this month. My thermometer was one day fourteen degrees and a half below the freezing point, within doors.
• Though large herds of deer do much harm to the neighbourhood, yet the injury to the morals of the people is of more moment than the loss of their crops.
• The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.
• Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish.
• It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.
• I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person's hand.
• I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology.
• Hedge-hogs abound in my gardens and fields.
• General Howe turned out some German wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighbourhood; and, at one time, a wild bull or buffalo: but the country rose upon them and destroyed them.
• Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams.
• The parish of Selborne, by taking in so much of the forest, is a vast district.