Science Quote by Gilbert White

Trust an 18th-century naturalist to make certainty sound like a moral position. Gilbert White`s line reads like a calm wager, but it`s really a declaration of method: observation over lore, patience over hearsay. The phrase "You may depend on it" isn`t just reassurance to a correspondent; it`s White quietly elevating field evidence to the status of reliability in a culture still stuffed with travelers` tales and inherited "common knowledge" about nature.

The sentence is built to do two things at once. First, it pins down a specific claim about a specific creature: the bunting (identified in Latin as emberiza miliaria) is not a winter migrant from England. Second, it performs the authority of naming. The Latin tag is a kind of rhetorical passport stamp, signaling that this isn`t rustic birdwatching but participation in the emerging scientific republic of letters. White writes from Selborne, but he`s in conversation with Linnaean taxonomy, with the new urge to classify, record, and correct.

Subtextually, it`s also a small rebellion against the era`s grander, more romantic narratives of nature. Migration was often misunderstood, and absence was easily mythologized. White insists on continuity: some animals endure the season with you, in your hedgerows, not in some distant elsewhere. The quiet confidence matters because it invites replication. If you "depend on it", you`re being asked to look again, keep a notebook, and let winter test the claim.