Science Quote by Gilbert White

There is a polite English dagger hidden in that word "strangely". Gilbert White isn’t just observing a stylistic quirk; he’s drawing a boundary around what he considers legitimate science. Calling the French "prolix" in natural history reads like a minor complaint about verbosity, but the subtext is methodological: too many words imply too little fieldwork, too much system-building, too much performance.

White writes out of a distinctly 18th-century English empiricism that prized patient attention to the local and the observable. In The Natural History of Selborne, his authority comes from modesty and specificity: seasons, birds, hedgerows, the slow accrual of detail that looks almost anti-theoretical. Against that ethos, "prolix" becomes a cultural critique. French natural history, associated with salons, grand taxonomies, and the rhetorical sheen of encyclopedic ambition, can seem to White like nature filtered through narrative flourishes rather than confronted as lived environment.

The line also carries the period’s national rivalry in miniature. Britain and France were competing not only on battlefields and in colonies, but in the marketplace of ideas: whose knowledge sounded more honest, more modern, more trustworthy. White’s "I think" softens the blow, a performance of restraint that doubles as moral positioning. He implies: our science is quieter, therefore truer.

It works because it’s small. A casual aside becomes a thesis about credibility: in science, style isn’t decoration; it’s a claim about how you know what you know.