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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
American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary:
natural history |
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Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Natural history |
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals.[1] Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms.[2] That is a very broad designation in a world filled with many narrowly focused disciplines. So while modern natural history dates historically from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and the medieval Arabic world through to the scattered European Renaissance scientists working in near isolation, today's field is more of a cross discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences. For example, geobiology has a strong multi-disciplinary nature combining scientists and scientific knowledge of many specialty sciences.
A person who studies natural history is known as a naturalist or "natural historian".
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The English term 'natural history' is a translation of the Latin naturalis historia. Its meaning has narrowed considerably over time (see also History below). In antiquity, it covered more-or-less anything which is connected with nature or which uses materials drawn from nature; see for example the contents of Pliny's encyclopedia of this title, published circa 77 to 79 AD.
Until well into the nineteenth century, knowledge was considered by Europeans to have two main divisions: the humanities (including theology), and studies of nature. Studies of nature could in turn be divided, with natural history being the descriptive counterpart to natural philosophy which was the analytical study of nature. In modern terms, natural philosophy roughly corresponded to modern physics and chemistry, while natural history included the biological and geological sciences. The two were strongly associated. During the heyday of the gentleman scientists, many figures contributed to both fields, and early papers in both were commonly read at professional science society meetings such as the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences – both founded during the seventeenth century.
Natural history had been encouraged by practical motives, such as the work of Linnaeus motivated by the desire to improve the economical condition of the Swedish kingdom.[3] Similarly, the Industrial Revolution prompted the development of the science of geology through the need to analyze rock strata (layers) in order to find mineral deposits.[4]
Modern definitions of natural history come from a variety of fields and sources, and many of the modern definitions emphasize a particular aspect of the field, creating a plurality of definitions with a number of common themes among them. For example, while natural history is most often defined as a type of observation and a subject of study, it can also be defined as a body of knowledge, and as a craft or a practice, in which the emphasis is placed more on the observer than on the observed.[5]
Modern definitions from biologists often focus on the scientific study of individual organisms in their environment, as seen in this definition by M. Bates: "Natural history is the study of animals and Plants - of organisms. ... I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual - of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities"[6] and this more recent definition by D.S. Wilcove and T. Eisner: "The close observation of organisms—their origins, their evolution, their behavior, and their relationships with other species".[7] This focus on organisms in their environment is also echoed by H.W. Greene and J.B. Losos: "Natural history focuses on where organisms are and what they do in their environment, including interactions with other organisms. It encompasses changes in internal states insofar as they pertain to what organisms do".[8] Some definitions go further, focusing on direct observation of organisms in their environment, both past and present, such as this one by G.A. Bartholomew: "A student of natural history, or a naturalist, studies the world by observing plants and animals directly. Because organisms are functionally inseparable from the environment in which they live and because their structure and function cannot be adequately interpreted without knowing some of their evolutionary history, the study of natural history embraces the study of fossils as well as physiographic and other aspects of the physical environment".[9] A common thread in many definitions of natural history is the inclusion of a descriptive component, as seen in a recent definition by H.W. Greene: "Descriptive ecology and ethology".[10]
Recently, several authors have argued for a more expansive view of natural history, including S. Herman, who defines the field as "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",[11] and T. Fleischner, who defines the field even more broadly, as “A practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy".[12] These definitions explicitly include the arts in the field of natural history, and are aligned with the broad definition outlined by B. Lopez, who defines the field as the "Patient interrogation of a landscape" while referring to the natural history knowledge of the Eskimo.[13]
A slightly different, but equally expansive framework for natural history is also implied in the scope of work encompassed by many leading natural history museums, which often include elements of Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology and Astronomy along with Botany and Zoology,[14][15] or include both cultural and natural components of the world.[16][17]
The plurality of definitions for this field has recently been recognized as both a weakness and a strength,[18] and a range of definitions have recently been offered by practitioners in a recent collection of views on natural history.[19]
Natural history begins with Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analyzed the diversity of the natural world. Natural history, as a discipline, had existed since classical times, and fifteenth-century Europeans were very familiar with Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis. From the ancient Greeks until the work of Carolus Linnaeus (also known as Carl Linnaeus, or Carl von Linné) and other 18th century naturalists, the main concept of natural history was the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, a conceptual arrangement of minerals, vegetables, more primitive forms of animals, and more complex life forms on a linear scale of increasing "perfection", culminating in our species.
Dioscorides' De Materia Medica is often said to be the oldest and most valuable work in the history of botany.[20] A Greek manuscript of Aristotle's Biological Works, written in Constantinople in the mid-9th century, and preserved at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is probably the oldest surviving manuscript of texts that founded the science of biology.[21]
While natural history was basically static in medieval Europe, it continued to be developed by Arabic scholars during the Arab Agricultural Revolution. Al-Jahiz described early natural history ideas such as the "struggle for existence" (Malthus' phrase),[22] and the idea of a food chain.[23][verification needed] He was an early adherent of environmental determinism.[24][verification needed] Al-Dinawari is considered the founder of Arabic botany for his Book of Plants, in which he described at least 637 plants and discussed plant development from germination (sprouting) to death, describing the phases of plant growth and the production of flowers and fruit.[25] Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati developed an early scientific method for botany, introducing empirical and experimental techniques in the testing, description and identification of numerous materia medica, and separating unverified reports from those supported by actual tests and observations.[26] His student Ibn al-Baitar wrote a pharmaceutical encyclopedia describing 1,400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of which were his own original discoveries. A Latin translation of his work was useful to European biologists and pharmacists in the 18th and 19th centuries.[27] Earth sciences such as geology were also studied extensively by Arabic geologists, but by Avicenna's time, around 1000, the Arab Empire was in decline and scientists were not free to publish their ideas.[28]
From the 13th century, the work of Aristotle was adapted rather rigidly into Christian philosophy, particularly by Thomas Aquinas, forming the basis for natural theology. During 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. Andrea Cesalpino was the creator of one of the first herbaria and the inventor of botanical systematics. Leonhart Fuchs was one of the three founding fathers of botany, along with Otto Brunfels and Hieronymus Bock. Important contributors to the field were also Valerius Cordus, Konrad Gesner (Historiae animalium), Frederik Ruysch, or Gaspard Bauhin.[21] 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 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus.[21]
In modern Europe, professional disciplines such as physiology, botany, zoology, geology, and palaeontology were 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. In Victorian Scotland it was believed that the study of natural history contributed to good mental health.[29] Particularly in Britain and the United States, this grew into specialist hobbies such as the study of birds, butterflies, seashells (malacology/conchology), beetles 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 continue to play a part in the study of biology, especially ecology (the study of natural systems involving living organisms and the inorganic components of the Earth's biosphere that support them), ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior), and evolutionary biology (the study of the relationships between life-forms over very long periods of time), 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 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of 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.
The term "natural history" alone, or sometimes together with archeology, forms the name of many national, regional and local natural history societies that maintain records for birds (ornithology), mammals (mammalogy), insects (entomology), fungi (mycology) and plants (botany). They may also have microscopical and geological sections.
Examples of these societies in Britain include the Natural History Society of Northumbria founded in 1829, 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)
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