THE CONTRIBUTION OF NATURAL HISTORY 

 TO HUMAN PROGRESS 



Btj G. F. FERRIS 



Stanford University 



The ^Ieanings of words quite commonly change over a period of time and a 

 meaning- that may have been current a hundred years ago may now be obsoles- 

 cent or even obsolete. So with the meaning of the words "natural history." If 

 we look back at the history of the development of biology, those words carried a 

 meaning a little over a hundred years ago that subsumed almost everything that 

 was then known about plants and animals, since what was then known, apart 

 from some small amount al)out human anatomy as a subject entirely by itself, 

 was mostly concerned with the questions of how many and how different were 

 the various kinds of organisms on the earth. It considered to some small degree 

 the manner in which those organisms were grossly put together, for a knowledge 

 of this was involved in determining how varied they might be. Work had been 

 done also in what we now call comparative anatomy, but this comparative anat- 

 omy, lacking the stimulating influence of the idea of evolution, really involved 

 nothing much more, even in the work of Cuvier, than a recital that in certain 

 kinds of animals certain structures were to be seen and in other kinds of animals 

 other structures were to be seen, together with the idea that an animal could be 

 identified merely by its bones or even by a single bone. 



It is quite true that some other things were included merely on the fringe of 

 natural history as thus conceived. Such was the knowledge of the cell and an 

 appreciation of its significance, which dates only from 1839. Such was the knowl- 

 edge of paleontology, which, long ago kidnaped by geology, is actually an aspect 

 of natural history and has its beginnings in the work of this same Cuvier, who 

 died in 1832. Such was the very slight knowledge of physiology that was all 

 there was of this now mighty branch of biology. Some of the subjects which now 

 occupy our attention had not yet been born. There could have been no cytology 

 until the knowledge of the cell had been developed beyond the point of its mere 

 recognition. There could consequently have been no such thing as histology until 

 the aggregation of cells into tissues had been grasped. There was a ]:)it of embry- 

 ology, going as far as macroscopic examination could carry observers, but the 

 real development of embryology had still to come. Genetics was not then even 

 conceived. Biochemistry was undreamed of and the various inferences to be 

 drawn from the knowledge of how many and how various are the forms of organ- 

 isms were just beginning to germinate in the minds of naturalists. 



So the naturalist as he existed, at least almost to the middle of the nineteenth 

 century, was primarily, if not almost exclusively, a man who had a knowledge 

 of as many different kinds of animals or plants as possible and who knew some- 



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