Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/548

530 different from botany and zoölogy; that a man might obtain an extensive knowledge of the structure and functions of plants and animals, without having need to enter upon the study of geology and mineralogy, and vice versa; and, further, as knowledge advanced, it became clear that there was a great analogy, a very close alliance, between those two sciences of botany and zoölogy which deal with living beings, while they are much more widely separated from all other studies. It is due to Buffon to remark that he clearly recognized, this great fact. He says: "Ces deux genres d'êtres organisés (les animaux et les végétaux) ont beaucoup plus de propriétés communes que de différences réelles." Therefore it is not wonderful that at the beginning of the present century, and oddly enough in two different countries, and, so far as I know, without any intercommunication between the respective writers, two famous men clearly conceived the notion of uniting the whole of the sciences which deal with living matter into one whole, and of dealing with them as one discipline. In fact, I may say there were three men to whom this idea occurred contemporaneously, although there were but two who carried it into effect, and only one who worked it out completely. The persons to whom I refer were the eminent physiologist Bichat, the great naturalist Lamarck, in France; and a distinguished German, Treviranus. Bichat assumed the existence of a special group of "physiological" sciences. Lamarck, in a work published in 1801, for the first time made use of the name "biologie," from the two Greek words which signify a discourse upon life and living things. About the same time it occurred to Treviranus that all those sciences which deal with living matter are essentially and fundamentally one, and ought to be treated as a whole, and in the year 1802 he published the first volume of what he also called "Biologie." Treviranus's great merit consists in this, that he worked out his idea, and that he published the very remarkable book to which I refer, which consists of six volumes, and which occupied him for twenty years—from 1802 to 1822.

That is the origin of the term "biology," and that is how it has come about that all clear thinkers and lovers of consistent nomenclature have substituted for the old confusing name of "natural history," which has conveyed so many meanings, the term "biology" to denote the whole of the sciences which deal with living things, whether they be animals or whether they be plants. Some little time ago—in the course of this year, I think—I was favored by a learned classic, Dr. Field, of Norwich, with a disquisition, in which he endeavored to prove that from a philological point of view neither Treviranus nor Lamarck had any right to coin this new word "biology" for his