It was in this sense that
the term was understood by the great writers of the middle of the last
century--Buffon and Linnaeus--by Buffon in his great work, the "Histoire
Naturelle Generale," and by Linnaeus in his splendid achievement, the
"Systema Naturae." 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 day. There
are now in existence in some of our northern universities, chairs of
"Civil and Natural History," in which "Natural History" is used to
indicate exactly what Hobbes and Bacon meant by that term. The unhappy
incumbent of the chair of Natural History is, or was, supposed to cover
the whole ground of geology, mineralogy, and zoology, perhaps even
botany, in his lectures.
But as science made the marvellous progress which it did make at the
latter 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, widely different from
botany and zoology; 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 or 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
zoology which deal with living beings, while they are much more widely
separated from all other studies.
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