natural history

1. The study and description of organisms and natural objects, especially their origins, evolution, and interrelationships.
2. 1. A collection of facts about the development of a natural process or entity: the natural history of early hominids as revealed in the fossil record.
   2. A work or treatise containing such facts.

Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492 transformed natural history perhaps more than any it did other early modern science. The ensuing development of European maritime empires of trade and commerce opened new routes for the acquisition of specimens, supplied museums of natural history with countless new species, and ultimately shaped natural history itself into a science intimately embedded within European systems of colonial governance over non-European peoples, floras, and faunas.

Natural history, as a discipline, had existed since classical times, and fifteenth-century Europeans were very familiar with Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis (40–79 C.E.; Natural history). Throughout the early modern period, natural history continued to be acknowledged as the science that described the three kingdoms of the natural world: animals, plants, and minerals. Many other types of enquiry and interpretation would be undertaken under the umbrella term natural history between 1450 and 1789, but natural history as an enterprise of acquisition and description was mirrored in the sites in which it was practiced: collections. The early modern museum, cabinet, Wunderkammer ('chamber of wonders') or studio ('study') developed out of the medieval treasury and other settings—usually princely or ecclesiastical—in which rare, precious, and exotic items were amassed. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, collections continued to be largely the province of princely owners, making visible not only their personal wealth, but also their ability to gain access to unique objects from other parts of the world. Universality and comprehensiveness was the leading characteristic of these collections, which were designed as microcosms of the whole world, and in which natural rarities and works of artifice were not separated. Early modern collections were both showpieces that displayed power and repositories that preserved value.

Humanist Natural History

Sixteenth-century natural history was part of the humanist tradition of learning with its literary and artistic orientation, typified by the writings of the Dutch scholar and theologian Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536). The study of the natural world in the early modern period was first and foremost a philological pursuit. Authors of new publications plundered earlier manuscript and published works of natural history for descriptions, anecdotes, and proverbs concerning natural objects, including many that would today seem quite foreign to a scientific approach. The Milanese jurist Andrea Alciati's Emblemata (1522) configured animals as literary puzzles, with an obscure image and motto that the reader could decode by means of an epigrammatic poem. Emblematic texts of natural history accumulated literary materials rather than observations: fables, emblems, proverbs, allegories, sympathies. This emblematic tradition emphasized the symbolism of animals alongside their uses, rather than their anatomy or classification; it continued to dominate natural history until the very end of the sixteenth century, exemplified in the writings of naturalists such as the Lutheran Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534–1598).

By the end of the sixteenth century, learned men across Europe collected natural history objects and advanced explanations for their nature, types, and transformations. Massive publication projects were often associated with collections like the famous studio of the "Bolognese Aristotle," Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). The great collections of individuals like Aldrovandi, the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato (1550–1631) or the Dane Olaus Worm (1588–1654) were famous throughout Europe, visited by princes and noblemen, and documented in printed descriptions and catalogs such as the Museum Wormianum of 1655 in Leiden. Collections continued to play a central part in princely and scholarly identity, as in natural historical practice, throughout the early modern period, although the principles of their construction varied over time. In his many writings, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) called for the ejection of philology from natural history and for greater attention to wonders and monsters, the exotic and the rare. By the 1660s, museums were theaters of marvels, where the scholarly observer was encouraged to contemplate the philosophical issues raised by the juxtaposition of neighboring objects, which might reveal contrasts or similarities, the variety or the uniformity of nature. The wondrous natural or artificial object served as a basis for philosophical analysis, natural theology, and reflection on the role of the human observer, both as part of the natural world and as the transformer of its materials by art. Such studies always had a theological purpose as well: museums of natural history were described as "books of nature," which the scholar could read alongside the great book, the Bible, for pious purposes. This natural theological approach was typified by the writings of the Cambridge botanist John Ray (1627–1705).

Accumulating and Classifying

A number of important institutions of European science were founded during the Renaissance, supported by rulers, nobles, universities, and municipal authorities. Alongside observatories, laboratories, and anatomy theaters came the first botanical gardens: Padua (1546) and Pisa (1547). Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), professor of philosophy, medicine, and botany at Pisa (1555–1592) and director of the botanical garden (1554–1558), was also the creator of one of the first herbaria and the inventor of botanical systematics. Cesalpino's classificatory system was an attempt to bring natural history within the purview of scholastic philosophy, with its logical categories and formulae. This exercise in conferring scholarly prestige upon an activity hitherto largely limited to medical herbalism enshrined botany within the universities and gave it the status of a science. Up until the end of the eighteenth century and beyond, natural historical classifications, such as that invented by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708), professor of botany at the Jardin du Roi in Paris (founded 1635; since 1793, the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle), continued to draw on Cesalpino's work. Of all the subdisciplines of natural history, botany was the first to be formalized independently and to be practiced within institutions dedicated to its pursuit. Classification demanded not only the generation of logical categories based on a philosophical system, but also the material and practical enterprise of sorting, preserving, identifying, naming, distributing and, sometimes, propagating specimens from the three kingdoms of nature, animals, plants, and minerals. Botanical specimens far outstripped other natural history specimens such as animal carcasses or mineral samples in their portability and ease of preservation. By contrast, animal classification was contested, and reliable methods of preservation did not emerge until the very end of the seventeenth century at the hands of the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731). Minerals, with the exception of gemstones and precious metals, were less amenable to transportation or exploitation, although they were well represented in collections devoted to local natural history.

Natural history as a cumulation of objects and observations provided both factual certainty and greater knowledge of God, but it also had economic outcomes. Europe's botanical gardens were important centers for the acquisition, propagation, and distribution of new species derived from voyages of discovery and conquest undertaken with increasing frequency towards the eighteenth century. The potential of replicating useful plants, including coffee, potatoes, pineapples, and nutmeg, was explored throughout the early modern period, but more systematically after the formation of the first colonial botanical gardens in the late seventeenth century. Scientific participation in the proceeds of imperialist enterprises increased substantially during the eighteenth century as naturalists presented the organized pursuit of useful plants, animals, and minerals to rulers and patrons as indispensable to national wealth. Curious natural history thus coexisted with a repertoire of activities and practices—cultivation, exchange, consumption—that would transform the flora, fauna, foods and other natural resources of western Europe forever. Such an approach to natural history as a science of resources, peaking in the eighteenth century, required extensive cooperation among naturalists as well as vast financial support. A resource-oriented approach to natural history also justified the publication of local natural histories itemizing the flora, fauna, and mineral wealth of one province or state, especially in England and the German lands.

Commerce and the Public Sphere

The distinction between private and public collections, or between curious and useful, was rarely clear-cut in botanical gardens, academies, or princely collections. Even naturalists wholly lacking institutional affiliations depended for their collecting upon the growth of European commerce and exploration. Natural history specimens ranked alongside valuable works of art from porcelain to paintings in the households of wealthy collectors and fetched nearly as much in the marketplace. The Dutch Republic was a center for fashions in the collection of natural objects, from tulips in the 1630s to shells in the 1710s. Both depended on the wide global reach of Dutch trade and colonization to supply new specimens. From a private collector's viewpoint, there was no categorical distinction to be made between beautiful objects of nature and art; seventeenth-century collectors admired the artifice of nature in decorating flowers or butterflies in much the same way as they appreciated the artistry of antique coins or sculpture. Natural objects acquired value within the marketplace, and their meaning was often controlled by wealthy connoisseurs of the fine arts and by the merchants who sold to them. This commercialization of natural history affected even rulers. As part of his attempt to westernize Russia by founding scientific institutions, Peter the Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725), entered into negotiations with several naturalists to buy a collection worthy of his nation, finally succeeding in purchasing that formed by the Dutch apothecary Albert Seba (1665–1736). Although institution-based naturalists called for the separation of natural history objects from other types of collectables and the formation of collections dedicated exclusively to the natural world, such goals were not systematically pursued anywhere before 1789.

As were most sciences of the period, natural history was largely a male pursuit, with women collectors, such as the German artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), greatly in the minority. Because imported specimens were rare and costly, early modern collectors were usually rich. The Dutch turn toward fashions in collecting was the start of a bigger Europe-wide transformation in natural history that paralleled the growth of a middling market for books and luxury items. By the eighteenth century, natural history publications, specimen sales, and public, pay-on-entry collections proliferated. Critiques of the pursuit of luxury among the middling sort accordingly hit hard at certain versions and practitioners of natural history. Private collectors were castigated for unscholarly amassing of natural objects as a means to display their personal wealth, and rulers were exhorted to support enterprises for a useful, rather than spectacular, natural history.

The lack of formal methods for accrediting scientific expertise meant that early modern naturalists in institutions were effectively on a par with unaffiliated private collectors. In early modern Europe there were no university degrees in natural history and no formal training programs or diplomas in the natural sciences. Individuals entered posts in princely or municipal institutions through personal patronage from social superiors. Often they acquired their knowledge and skills through a sort of informal apprenticeship under renowned naturalists, by participating in botanizing journeys or at the dissecting table. To acquire renown and scientific authority as a naturalist in the early modern period was thus no easy task, involving extensive social interaction and material manipulation, much of which has left little historical trace. If any one category of individuals had a privileged relationship with the objects of natural history, it was licensed medical practitioners. Apothecaries routinely dealt with large masses of animal, plant, and mineral material, and physicians often had a working knowledge of botany and anatomy. Thus many prominent early modern naturalists were also physicians, from Ruysch in Amsterdam to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) at the Royal Society in London. Right up to the mid-eighteenth century, this privileged relation between medicine and natural history persisted, and it is only from 1750 onwards that the beginnings of its unraveling can be seen in the filling of natural historical posts by non-medically trained individuals.

From Emblems to Experiments

In combining an emphasis on the literary and stylistic description of nature with a concern for its experimental and instrumental investigation, early modern natural history challenges preconceptions about linear progress in the history of scientific activity in the West such as are frequently represented in histories of the "scientific revolution" and the Enlightenment. The history of natural history relates to the history of display, order, and power for the early modern period, as well as to the history of early modern commerce and consumption. It was characterized by a close relationship with language, philology, and art, but, like other disciplines, it was transformed by the emergence of specialized institutions across Europe and by the rise to prominence of experimentation and observation as principles of practice in the scientific study of nature from the mid-seventeenth century. It was a science typified by social practices—correspondence and exchange—as much as by texts, objects, and classifications. More than almost any other scientific activity, it was also shaped by the dependency of collections upon the gradual process of global scientific conquest. The transformation in natural history between 1450 and 1789 was dramatic. Emblems had vanished, fabulous beasts were vilified, and naturalists boasted less of their literary skills than of their powers of accurate observation. Whole groups of animals had disappeared from natural history, from the mermaid and unicorn to the hippogriff and basilisk, and others, such as the molecular animals (microorganisms), had entered it, symbolizing a shift in attention from texts to instruments, experiments, and observation.

Thanks to the new forms of experimental natural philosophy characterizing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific activity, natural history was gradually ceasing to be a science of words and objects alone. From the 1660s onwards, European naturalists investigated animal and plant physiology, opening up new domains of interpretation for natural beings, as for example the inquiries into plant sexuality pursued by Sébastien Vaillant (1669–1722) in Paris and the English botanist Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712). By the end of the eighteenth century, experiment had a prominent place in natural history, matched only by ambitious and labor-intensive networks of communication that gave naturalists access to specimens from around the world. Old and new traditions alike were evident in the activities of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, better known as Carl, or Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), who drew upon Cesalpino's scholastic logic to create his sexual system, a classification based entirely on the sexual parts of the plant. The system, first published in Systema Naturae (1735; System of nature) and propagated by a European network of proselytizing Linnaean students, would earn lasting renown for its author as the "Prince of Botanists." Less well-known are Linnaeus's extensive experiments on naturalizing animals and plants within Sweden, and his close connections to supporters of cameralist politics there. His natural history was both a classificatory and an economic enterprise, grounded in a concern to understand the workings of Providence in distributing resources for mankind across the globe.

On the face of it, nothing could have been more different than the radical classificatory skepticism advanced by Linnaeus's archrival, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788), the head of the Paris Jardin du Roi, in the famous Histoire naturelle (1749–1788, 1789; Natural history). Utterly different from Linnaeus's dry, aphorismic style, Buffon's poetic descriptions sketched cosmogonies and sweeping portraits of man's past, present, and future place in nature. Yet he was as active as Linnaeus in supporting a global program of acquisition and acclimatization of natural productions at his institution. More secular and more radical than Linnaeus, Buffon, the "French Pliny," concerned himself primarily with animals, opening the way for his institution to become the leading European center of natural history by 1800, and for zoology to become the nineteenth century's model of natural historical enquiry.

Bibliography

Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York, 1998.

Drayton, Richard. Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the "Improvement" of the World. New Haven and London, 2000.

Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994.

Impey, Oliver, and Arthur Mac Gregor, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford and New York, 1985.

Jardine, Nicholas, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Pinault, Madeleine. The Painter as Naturalist: From Dürer to Redouté. Translated by Philip Sturgess. Paris, 1991. On the art of natural history.

Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. London, 1990.

Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York and London, 2002. Numerous helpful essays on preservation, commerce and the problems these created for natural historical knowledge.

Stemerding, Dirk. Plants, Animals and Formulae: Natural History in the Light of Latour's Science in Action and Foucault's The Order of Things. Enschede, 1991.

Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. New York, 1996.

—E. C. SPARY

1. The study and description of organisms and natural objects, especially their origins, evolution, and interrelationships.
2. A collection of facts about the development of a natural process or object.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the systematic account of natural phenomena

For other uses, see Natural History.

"Naturalist" redirects here. For other uses, see Naturalist (disambiguation).

Table of natural history, 1728 Cyclopaedia

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, usually leaning toward the observational rather than the experimental, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals.^[1] Natural history involves the research and formation of statements that make elements of life and life styles comprehensible by describing the relevant structures, operations and circumstances of various species, such as diet, reproduction, and social grouping.^[2] The term has grown to be an umbrella term for what are now often viewed as several distinct scientific disciplines of integrative organismal biology. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and climatology.

Natural history is the scientific study of plants and animals in their natural environments. It is concerned with levels of organization from the individual organism to the ecosystem, and stresses identification, life history, distribution, abundance, and inter-relationships. It often and appropriately includes an esthetic component.

—Stephen Herman, 2002

It has historically been a haphazard study, description, and classification of natural objects, such as animals, plants, minerals, and placed an importance and significance on fieldwork rather than lab work.^[3] A person interested in natural history is known as a naturalist or natural historian. Natural History is not commonly applied to the fields of astronomy, physics, or chemistry.^[3]

History of natural history

The roots of natural history go back to Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analyzed the diversity of the natural world. From the ancient Greeks until the work of Carolus Linnaeus and other 18th century naturalists, the central concept tying together the various domains of natural history was the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, which arranged minerals, vegetables, animals, and higher beings on a linear scale of increasing "perfection." Natural history was basically static through the Middle Ages, when the work of Aristotle was adapted into Christian philosophy, particularly by Thomas Aquinas, forming the basis for natural theology. In the Renaissance, scholars (herbalists and humanists, particularly) returned to direct observation of plants and animals for natural history, and many began to accumulate large collections of exotic specimens and unusual monsters. The rapid increase in the number of known organisms prompted many attempts at classifying and organizing species into taxonomic groups, culminating in the system of Linnaeus.

In the 18th century and well into the 19th century, natural history as a term was frequently used to refer to all descriptive aspects of the study of nature, as opposed to political or ecclesiastical history; it was the counterpart to the analytical study of nature, natural philosophy. Roughly it may be said that natural philosophy corresponded to modern physics and chemistry, while natural history included the biological and geological sciences.

Beginning in Europe, professional disciplines such as physiology, botany, zoology, geology, and palaeontology formed. Natural history, formerly the main subject taught by college science professors, was increasingly scorned by scientists of a more specialized manner and relegated to an "amateur" activity, rather than a part of science proper. Particularly in Britain and the United States, this grew into specialist hobbies such as the study of birds, butterflies and wildflowers; meanwhile, scientists tried to define a unified discipline of biology (though with only partial success, at least until the modern evolutionary synthesis). Still, the traditions of natural history continued to play a part in late 19th- and early 20th-century biology, especially ecology, ethology, and evolutionary biology, and re-emerges today as Integrative Organismal Biology......

Amateur collectors and natural history entrepreneurs played an important role in building the large natural history collections of the 19th and early-20th centuries, particularly the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Natural history museums

Main articles: :Category:Natural history museums and Natural history museum

The term "natural history" forms the descriptive part of institution names, such as the Natural History Museum in London, the Humboldt Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, the Grigore Antipa Museum of Natural History in Bucharest, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which also publishes a magazine called Natural History.

Natural history museums, which evolved from cabinets of curiosities, played an important role in the emergence of professional biological disciplines and research programs. Particularly in the 19th century, scientists began to use their natural history collections as teaching tools for advanced students and the basis for their own morphological research.

Natural history societies

The term "natural history" alone, or sometimes together with archaeology, forms the name of many national, regional and local natural history societies that maintain records for birds (ornithology), mammals (mammology), insects (entomology), fungi (mycology) and plants (botany). They may also have microscopical and geological sections.

Examples of these societies in Britain include the British Entomological and Natural History Society founded in 1872, Birmingham Natural History Society, Glasgow Natural History Society, London Natural History Society founded in 1858, Manchester Microscopical and Natural History Society established in 1880, Scarborough Field Naturalists' Society and the Sorby Natural History Society, Sheffield, founded in 1918. The growth of natural history societies was also spurred due to the growth of British colonies in tropical regions with numerous new species to be discovered. Many civil servants took an interest in their new surroundings, sending specimens back to museums in Britain. (See also Indian natural history)

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Natural history

• Natural philosophy
• Natural science
• Naturalism (philosophy)
• Nature documentary
• Nature writing
• Nature
• Nature study
• Big History
• Timeline of evolution

References

Citations and notes

1. ^ Natural History WordNet Search, princeton.edu.
2. ^ http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Primates/glossary.cfm
3. ^ ^{a b} http://alpha.fdu.edu/~jbecker/nature/natureglossary.html

General information

• Herman, Stephen G. Wildlife biology and natural history: time for a reunion. Journal of Wildlife Management (2002) 66(4):933–946
• Kohler, Robert E. Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002.
• Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982.
• Rainger, Ronald; Keith R. Benson; and Jane Maienschein, editors. The American Development of Biology. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1988.

External links

• Natural History Museum, London
• London Natural History Society
• Birmingham Natural History Society
• Bombay Natural History Society, India
• Glasgow Natural History Society
• Manchester Microscopical & Natural History Society
• Scarborough Field Naturalists' Society
• Sorby Natural History Society, Sheffield
• American Museum of Natural History, New York
• Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle
• Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
• Rhode Island Natural History Survey
• Natural History New Zealand Ltd
• The Naturalist's Net Online Forum
• Slater Museum of Natural History, Tacoma
• University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Eugene
• Vancouver Natural History Society, Vancouver Canada

History of biology
Fields and disciplines	Natural history • History of agriculture • History of medicine • History of anatomy • History of zoology (before Darwin)• History of plant systematics • History of geology • History of paleontology • History of evolutionary thought • History of zoology (after Darwin) • History of ecology • History of model organisms • History of phycology • History of genetics • History of biochemistry • History of agricultural science • History of molecular biology • History of molecular evolution • History of immunology • History of biotechnology
Institutions	Rothamsted Experimental Station • Pasteur Institute • Max Planck Society • Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory • Stazione Zoologica • Marine Biological Laboratory • Rockefeller University • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute • Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Experiments	Griffith's experiment • Miller-Urey experiment • Luria-Delbrück experiment • Hershey-Chase experiment • Meselson-Stahl experiment • Crick, Brenner et al. experiment • Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment • Nirenberg and Leder experiment
Publications	On Generation and Corruption • Historia Plantarum • De humani corporis fabrica • De motu cordis • Micrographia • Systema Naturae • Philosophie Zoologique • Principles of Geology • Vestiges of Creation • The Origin of Species • "Experiments on Plant Hybridization" • The Descent of Man • "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" • What is Life? • Genetics and the Origin of Species • "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids"
Influential figures	Aristotle • Andreas Vesalius • William Harvey • Antonie van Leeuwenhoek • Carolus Linnaeus • Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon • Jean-Baptiste Lamarck • Alexander von Humboldt • Charles Lyell • Charles Darwin • Alfred Russel Wallace • Gregor Mendel • Louis Pasteur • Robert Koch • Ernst Haeckel • Ivan Pavlov • Hugo de Vries • E. B. Wilson • Thomas Hunt Morgan • Aleksandr Oparin • Alexander Fleming • J. B. S. Haldane • Sewall Wright • R. A. Fisher • Konrad Lorenz • Barbara McClintock • Theodosius Dobzhansky • Ernst Mayr • George Beadle • Seymour Benzer • Rosalind Franklin • James D. Watson • Francis Crick • Fred Sanger • Max Perutz • John Kendrew • Sydney Brenner • Joshua Lederberg • Walter Gilbert • Kary Mullis • Stephen Jay Gould • Lynn Margulis • Carl Woese • Jane Goodall
Related topics	History of science • History of medicine • Philosophy of biology • Timeline of biology and organic chemistry • Natural philosophy • Natural theology • Humboldtian science • Relationship between religion and science • Eugenics • Human Genome Project • Darwin Day • History of creationism • History of the creation-evolution controversy

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