Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/547

Rh those branches of science, such as astronomy, and what we now call physics, which occupy a very large portion of the domain of what the older writers understood by natural history. And inasmuch as the partly deductive and partly experimental methods of treatment, to which Newton and others subjected these branches of human knowledge, showed that the phenomena of Nature which belonged to them were susceptible of explanation, and thereby came within the reach of what was called "philosophy" in those days, so much of this kind of knowledge as was not included under astronomy came to be spoken of as "natural philosophy"—a term which Bacon had employed in a much wider sense. Time went on, and yet other branches of science developed themselves. Chemistry took a definite shape, and as all these sciences, such as astronomy, natural philosophy, and chemistry, were susceptible either of mathematical treatment or of experimental treatment, or of both, a great distinction was drawn between the experimental branches of what had previously been called natural history and the observational branches—those in which experiment was (or appeared to be) of doubtful use, and where, at that time, mathematical methods were inapplicable. Under these circumstances the old name of "natural history" stuck by the residuum, by those phenomena which were not, at that time, susceptible of mathematical or experimental treatment; that is to say, those phenomena of Nature which come now under the general heads of physical geography, geology, mineralogy, the history of plants, and the history of animals. It was in this sense that the term was understood by the great writers of the middle of the last century—Buffon and Linnæus—by Buffon in his great work, the "Histoire Naturelle Générale," and by Linnæus in his splendid achievement, the "Systema Naturæ." The subjects they deal with are spoken of as "natural history," and they called themselves, and were called, naturalists. But you will observe that this was not the original meaning of these terms; but that they had, by this time, acquired a signification widely different from that which they possessed primitively.

The sense in which "natural history" was used at the time I am now speaking of has, to a certain extent, endured to the present clay. There are now in existence, in some of our northern universities, chairs of Civil and Natural History, in which the term "natural history" is used to indicate exactly what Hobbes and Bacon meant by that term. There are others in which the unhappy incumbent of the chair of Natural History is, or was, still supposed to cover the whole ground of geology and mineralogy, zoölogy, perhaps even botany, in his lectures. But as science made the marvelous progress which it did make at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, thinking men began to discern that under this title of "natural history" there were included very heterogeneous constituents—that, for example, geology and mineralogy were, in many respects, very