About forty pages into Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne the reader will come across the word ‘you’. This ‘you’, however, is rather elusive – ‘when you were recently in town’; ‘your journey to Scotland’; ‘your’ British Zoology. We know, of course, from the opening pages, that the addressee is the Welsh naturalist and travel writer, Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). But he cuts a very indistinct figure in a vivid cast of honey buzzards, pet toads, hedgehogs and torpid swallows. Indeed, readers of White’s classic Selborne are often surprised to learn that Pennant is one of the two correspondents whose letters to White shape the book – he is certainly not as well-known now as he would have been in 1789.

Returning to the original correspondence, and drawing on the Thomas Pennant collections at the Natural History Museum and some wonderful illustrations, ‘Curious Minds’ introduces Pennant’s work and explores the relationship between the two men through their words, images and examples of the specimens they exchanged and discussed. What emerges is an energetic, engaging conversation between naturalists full of critical curiosity about the world around them. They are part, as Anne Secord has put it, of a ‘community of investigators’ engaged in a ‘continuous process of collaboration’.

Our exhibition is itself the product of a collaboration between the AHRC-funded Curious Travellers Project, the Natural History Museum, and Gilbert White’s House and Garden. We warmly invite all visitors to come and take part in this fascinating eighteenth-century conversation.