370 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



theory or doctrine of organic evolution, and in the displacement of 

 the prevailing theory of special creation, a forward step which 

 removed the principal stumbling-block in the way of acceptance 

 of the theory of general evolution, inorganic as well as organic, 

 telluric as well as stellar. In other words, Darwin's work at one 

 blow cleared the way for a new cosmogony. 



NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND NATURAL HISTORY. DIFFEREN- 

 TIATION AND HYBRIDIZING OF THE SCIENCES. Mathematics, 

 always recognized as a principal branch of the tree of learning, 

 at the beginning of the nineteenth century still held its place as the 

 mother of the sciences. Astronomy, also, often called the queen 

 of the sciences, still occupied its ancient and honorable position, 

 having by this time lost all traces of discreditable affiliation with 

 astrology. With the physical and natural sciences, as we now 

 know them, the case was different. These still existed in a com- 

 paratively amorphous and largely undifferentiated condition as 

 "natural philosophy" and "natural history," the former the 

 lineal descendant of the Ionian nature philosophy, now promoted to 

 a high place in public esteem by the work of Newton, whose great 

 Principia were philosophiae naturalis. Gradually, as time went 

 on, chemistry was more and more differentiated from natural 

 philosophy, until about 1875 it became customary to drop the 

 term natural philosophy, using instead two terms, chemistry and 

 physics. By the end of the century the present practice was fully 

 established. 



The primitive condition of the natural history sciences at the 

 beginning of the century may be inferred from the remark of an 

 eminent geologist (Geikie) that at that time geology and biology 

 were not yet inductive sciences. By 1880, however, natural 

 history had budded off geology, botany, zoology, and physiology 

 as independent sciences, and the parent term, though still em- 

 ployed, was rapidly falling into disuse, having become much too 

 broad for any single science. 



Meantime, hybridizing as well as differentiation has become 

 common, e.g. of physics with chemistry (physical chemistry), 

 and of mathematics with physics (mathematical physics) and with 



