Gilbert White

Hedge-hogs abound in my gardens and fields.

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.

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.

I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology.

I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person's hand.

Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish.

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.

The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.

The parish of Selborne, by taking in so much of the forest, is a vast district.

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.

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.

You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not leave this country in the winter.

Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams.