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Gilbert White’s Selborne is the fourth most published book in the English language, the new editions and translations numbering in excess of two hundred. What explains the appeal of this little book, which appears to be no more than a collection of letters by a country clergyman on local natural history? Gilbert White’s material contributions to science, though considerable, were minor in comparison with those of giants like Darwin and Mendel. Yet his book, more than any other, has shaped our everyday view of the relations between man and nature, not just because of the accuracy and percipience of his observation, but because of the sense he gives of birds and animals as living things sharing a living situation with each other and with man. Through his writing, Selborne, the little English parish that the reader of his book comes to know so well, becomes, in David Elliston Allen’s phrase, 'the secret, private parish inside each one of us'.