Natural history encompasses but is not limited to scientific research. It involves the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. Thus, it goes back to the observations of nature in ancient times, the medieval natural philosophers through the naturalists of the European Renaissance to modern scientists. Natural history today is a cross-disciplinary field of knowledge that includes many disciplines such as geobiology, paleobotany, etc.
Antiquity
Antiquity gave us the world's first real scientists. The history of natural science begins with Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analyzed the diversity of the natural world. However, their research was also tied to mysticism and philosophy, without having a single system.
Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" was the first work to cover everything that could be found in the world, including living beings, geology, astronomy, technology, art and humankind as such.
"De Materia Medica" was written between AD 50 and 70 by Dioscorides, a Greek-born Roman physician. This book was popular for over 1500 years until it was abandoned during the Renaissance, making it one of the longest running natural history books.
From the ancient Greeks to the work of Carl Linnaeus and other 18th century naturalists, the core concept of this discipline was the Great Chain of Being, the arrangement of minerals, fruits, more primitive animal forms, and more complex life forms on a linear scale, as part of a process leading to excellence that culminates in our species. This idea became a kind of harbinger of Darwin's theory of evolution.
Medieval and Renaissance
The meaning of the English term natural history ("natural history", tracing paper from the Latin expression historia naturalis) has narrowed over time; while, on the contrary, the meaning of the related term nature (“nature”) has expanded. The same applies to the Russian language. In Russian, the terms "natural history" and "natural science", which were originally synonymous, were separated over time.
Knowledge of the term began to change during the Renaissance. In ancient times, "natural history" covered almost everything related to nature, or used materials created from nature. An example is the encyclopedia of Pliny the Elder, published about77 to 79 CE which covers astronomy, geography, people and their technology, medicine and superstition, and animals and plants.
Medieval European scholars believed that knowledge had two main sections: the humanities (primarily what is now known as philosophy and scholasticism) and theology, and science is studied mainly through texts, and not observation or experiment.
Natural history was mainly popular in Medieval Europe, although it developed at a much faster pace in the Arab and Eastern world. From the thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle were adapted rather rigidly to Christian philosophy, in particular by Thomas Aquinas, forming the basis of natural theology. During the Renaissance, scientists (especially herbalists and humanists) returned to direct observation of plants and animals, and many began to accumulate large collections of exotic specimens and unusual monsters, but, as natural history later proved, dragons, manticores and other mythical creatures do not exist.
The emergence of botany and the discovery of Linnaeus
The science of those times still continued to rely on the classics. But the then scientific community did not live by Pliny's "Natural History" alone. Leonhart Fuchs was one of the three founding fathers of botany, along with Otto Branfels and Hieronymus Bock. Other important contributors in this area were Valerius Cordus, Konrad Gesner (Historiae animalium), Frederik Ruysch and GaspardBauhin. The rapid growth in the number of known living organisms prompted many attempts to classify and organize species into taxonomic groups, culminating in the system of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus.
The study of nature was revived during the Renaissance and quickly became the third branch of academic knowledge, itself divided into descriptive natural history and natural philosophy, the analytical study of nature. Under modern conditions, natural philosophy roughly corresponded to modern physics and chemistry, while history included the biological and geological sciences. They were strongly connected.
New time
Natural history was encouraged by practical motives, such as Linnaeus' desire to improve Sweden's economic situation. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution spurred the development of geology that could help find mineral deposits.
Astronomer William Herschel was also a natural historian. Instead of working with plants or minerals, he worked with the stars. He spent his time building telescopes to see the stars and then observing them. In the process, he made all-star charts and wrote down everything he saw (while his sister Caroline took care of the documentation).
Union of Biology and Theology
Significant contributions to English natural history were made by naturalists such as Gilbert White, WilliamKirby, John George Wood and John Ray, who wrote about plants, animals and other creatures of Mother Nature. Many of these people wrote about nature to derive from their research a scientific-theological argument for the existence or goodness of God.
From mainstream science to prestigious hobby
Professional disciplines such as botany, geology, mycology, paleontology, physiology and zoology have already been formed in modern Europe. Natural history, previously the main subject of instruction for college faculty, was increasingly despised by scholars with more specialized occupations and relegated to "amateur" activities rather than science. In Victorian Scotland, studying it was believed to promote good mental he alth. Particularly in the UK and the United States, it has grown into a popular hobby like amateur study of birds, butterflies, shells (malacology/conchology), beetles, and wildflowers.
Branching biology into many disciplines
Meanwhile, scientists have tried to define a unified discipline of biology (albeit with partial success, at least until the modern evolutionary synthesis). Nevertheless, the traditions of natural history continue to play a role 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 relationship between life forms for very longperiods of time. Over time, the first thematic museums were created through the efforts of amateur naturalists and collectors.
Three of the greatest English naturalists of the nineteenth century - Henry W alter Bates, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace - all knew each other. Each of them traveled the world, spending years collecting thousands of specimens, many of which were new to science, and their work gave science advanced knowledge about the "remote" parts of the world: the Amazon basin, the Galapagos Islands and the Malay Archipelago. And in doing so, they helped transform biology from descriptive theory to scientific practice.
National Museums of Natural History
Themed museums dedicated to this topic exist all over the world and have played an important role in the emergence of professional biology disciplines and research programs. In particular, in the 19th century, scientists began to use their scientific collections as teaching tools for advanced students and the basis for their own morphological studies. Almost in every city in Russia there are museums of natural history, Kazan, Moscow and St. Petersburg are among them in the first place. In the West, such museums are one of the favorite places for tourists to pilgrimage.
