Science Quote by Gilbert White

A polite sentence that quietly announces a revolution: curiosity as a moral posture. Gilbert White is asking to be "better informed" about ichthyology, but the modesty is doing strategic work. In the 18th century, natural history was shifting from gentlemanly collecting and inherited lore toward observation, classification, and correspondence networks that could make local knowledge portable. White, the parish-naturalist of Selborne, writes like someone who knows that science advances less through grand declarations than through disciplined attention.

The phrase "with regard to" is bureaucratic in tone, almost clerical, and that matters: it frames the study of fish not as eccentric hobbyism but as a legitimate domain deserving method and record-keeping. "Ichthyology" itself is a small flex. It signals participation in an emerging professional vocabulary, a willingness to let the classical, Latinate machinery of taxonomy organize the messy world of rivers and ponds. Yet White keeps the ego out of it. He doesn't claim expertise; he claims a gap.

The subtext is an invitation to community. White's best work depended on letters, queries, and other people sending sightings and specimens; this line reads like a door left intentionally open. It also hints at a larger Enlightenment ethic: knowledge is provisional, improvement is continuous, and even the most everyday creatures deserve serious scrutiny. The intent isn't just to learn about fish. It's to model how to learn, publicly, without pretending the world has already been solved.