[...] worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them...The later naturalist Charles Darwin, when asked in 1870 about books that had deeply impressed him in his youth, mentioned White's writings.

[6] However, in Darwin's book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould: Through the Action of Worms, with Observations of Their Habits (1881), there is no acknowledgement of White's earlier work in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne on the significance of earthworms in creating and maintaining topsoil.

[7] It has been argued that Darwin might not have propounded the theory of evolution without White's pioneering fieldwork establishing the importance of close observation.

[8] Rather than studying dead specimens, White observed live birds and animals in their own habitats over many years; creating a 'new kind of zoology, scientific, precise and based on the steady accumulation of detail'.

He based his work on accurate (if haphazard) recording of events, classifying, measuring, analysing data, making deductions from observations, and experimenting.

[10] Thus, Richard Mabey quotes White: 'during this lovely weather the congregating flocks of house martins on the Church and tower were very beautiful and very amusing!

American nature writer, Donald C. Peattie, writes in The Road of a Naturalist about White's contribution to the public interest in birds: "The bird census, now so widely promulgated by the Audubon Society, was the invention of Gilbert White; he was the original exponent, as far as I know, of the close seasonal observation of Nature, a branch of science known to the pedantic as phenology.

No professional ornithologist ever did so much to widen interest in birds; from White's pages they cock a friendly eye at us, and hop out of his leaves right over our thresholds.

"[12] 'White's other contributions to the field of natural history are impressive, for example, his close observation and recording of events over time led him to develop the idea of the 'food chain', laying the foundations for the modern study of ecology; he discovered a distinction between three species of leaf warblers based on their different songs; he pioneered modern theories on bird territory and its effects on their population.

[16] It was long held, "probably apocryphally", to be the fourth-most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

So 'The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes'; and 'Woodpeckers fly volatu undosu [in an undulating flight], opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising and falling in curves.

However, he has been called "the indispensable precursor to those great Victorians who would transform our ideas about life on Earth, especially in the undergrowth – Lyell, Spencer, Huxley and Darwin.

[24] Flora Thompson, the countryside novelist, said of White: "It is easy to imagine him, this very first of English nature writers, the most sober and modest, yet happiest of men.

[26][27] White is commemorated in the inscription on one of eight bells installed in 2009 at Holybourne, Hampshire[28] and in the Perivale Wood Local Nature Reserve, which is dedicated to his memory.

[citation needed] A stained glass window portraying St Francis of Assisi in Selborne church commemorates Gilbert White.