Jan. II, 1877] 



NA TURE 



219 



ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY^ 



IT is my duty to-night to speak about the study of Biology, 

 and while it may be that there are many among you who 

 are quite familiar with that study, yet as a lecturer of some 

 standing, it would, I know by experience, be very bad 

 policy on my part to suppose such to be extensively the 

 case. On the contrary, I must imagine that there are many 

 of you who would like to know what Biology is ; that 

 there will be others who have that amount of informa- 

 tion, but wou!d nevertheless gladly learn why it should be 

 worth their while to study Biology ; and yet others, again, 

 to whom these two points are clear, but who desire to 

 learn how they had best study it, and finally when they 

 had best study it ; and I shall address myself to the 

 endeavour to give you some answer to these four ques- 

 tions — what Biology is, why it should be studied, how 

 it should be studied, and when it should be studied. 



In the first place, in respect to what Biology is, there 

 are, I believe, some persons who imagine that the term 

 " Biology " is simply- a new-fangled denomination, a 

 neologism in short, for what used to be known under the 

 title of " Natural History," but I shall try to show you, on 

 the contrary, that the word is the expression of the growth 

 of science during the last 200 years, and came into exist- 

 ence half a century ago. 



At the revival of learning, knowledge was divided into 

 two kinds — the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of 

 man ; for it was the current idea then (and a great deal 

 of that ancient conception still remains) that there was a 

 sort of essential antithesis, not to say antagonism, between 

 nature and man ; and that the two had not very much to 

 do with one another, except that the one was oftentimes 

 exceedingly troublesome to the other. Though it is one 

 of the salient merits of our great philosophers of the 

 seventeenth century, that they recognise but one scientific 

 method, applicable alike to man and to nature, we find this 

 notion of the existence of a broad distinction between 

 nature and man in the writings of Bacon and Hobbes of 

 Malmesbury ; and I have brought with me that famous 

 work which is now so little known, greatly as it deserves 

 to be studied, " The Leviathan," in order that I may put 

 to you in the wonderfully terse and clear language of 

 Thomas Hobbes, what was his view of the matter. He 

 says : — 



" The register of knowledge of fact is called history. 

 Whereof there be two sorts, one called natural history ; 

 which is the history of such facts or effects of nature as 

 have no dependence on man's will ; such as are the his- 

 tories of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like. 

 The other is civil history ; which is the history of the 

 voluntary actions of men in commonwealths." 



So that all history of fact was divided into t hese two 

 great groups of natural and of civil history. The Royal 

 Society was in course of foundation about the time 

 that Hobbes was writing this book, which was published 

 in 165 1, and that Society is termed a "Society for the 

 Advancement of Natural Knowledge," which is nearly the 

 same thing as a " Society for the Advancement of Natural 

 History." As time went on, and the various branches of 

 human knowledge became more distinctly developed and 

 separated from one another, it was found that some were 

 much more susceptible of precise mathematical treatment 

 than others. The publication of the " Principia " of 

 Newton, which probably gave a greater stimulus to phy- 

 sical science than any work ever published before, or 

 which is likely to be published hereafter, showed that 

 precise mathematical methods were applicable to those 

 branches of science such as astronomy, and what we now 

 call physics, which occupy a very large portion of the 

 domain of what the older writers understood by natural 

 history. And inasmuch as the partly deductive and partly 



I A lecture by Prof. Huxley, delivered at the South Kensington Museum 

 on Saturday, December i6, 1876. 



experimental methods of treatment to which Newton and 

 others subjected these branches of human knowledge, 

 showed that the phenomena of nature which belonged 

 to them were susceptible of explanation, and thereby 

 came within the reach of what was called " philosophy" 

 in those days; so much of this kind of knowledge as was 

 not included under astronomy came to be spoken of as 

 " natural philosophy " — a term which Bacon had employed 

 in a much wider sense. Time went on, and yet other 

 branches of science developed themselves. Chemistry 

 took a definite shape, and as all these sciences, such as 

 astronomy, natural philosophy, and chemistiy, were sus- 

 ceptible either of mathematical treatment or of experi- 

 mental treatment, or of both, a great distinction was drawn 

 between the experimental branches of what had previously 

 been called natural history and the observational branches 

 — those in which experiment was (or appeared to be) of 

 doubtful use, and where, at that time, mathematical 

 methods were inapplicable. Under these circumstances 

 the old name of "Natural History" stuck by the resi- 

 duum, by those phenomena which were not, at that time, 

 susceptible of mathematical or experimental treatment ; 

 that is to say, those phenomena of nature which come now 

 under the general heads of physical geography, geology, 

 mineralogy, the history of plants, and the history of 

 animals. It was in this sense that the term was under- 

 stood by the great writers of the middle of the last century 

 — Buffon and Linnaeus — by Buffon in his great work, the 

 " Histoire Naturelle Gdndrale," and by Linnaeus in his 

 splendid achievement, the "Systema Naturae." The sub- 

 jects they deal with are spoken of as " Natural History," 

 and they called themselves and were called " Naturalists," 

 But you will observe that this was not the original meaning 

 of these terms; but that they had, by this time, acquired 

 a signification widely different from that which they pos- 

 sessed primitively. 



The sense in which " Natural History" was used at the 

 time I am now speaking of has, to a certain extent, en- 

 dured to the present day. There are now in existence, in 

 some of our northern universities, chairs of " Civil 

 and Natural History," in which "Natural History" 

 is used to indicate exactly what Hobbes and Bacon 

 meant by that term. There are others in which the 

 unhappy incumbent of the chair of Natural History is, 

 or was, still supposed to cover the whole ground of geo- 

 logy and mineralogy, zoology, perhaps even botany in 

 his lectures. But as science made the marvellous pro- 

 gress which it did make at the latter end of the last and 

 the beginning of the present century, thinking men began 

 to discern that under this title of " Natural History" there 

 were included very heterogeneous constituents— that, for 

 example, geology and mineralogy were, in many respects, 

 widely different from botany and zoology ; that a man might 

 obtain an extensive knowledge of the structure and func- 

 tions of plants and animals without having need to enter 

 upon the study of geology and mineralogy, and vice 

 versa; and, further, as knowledge advanced, it became 

 clear that there was a great analogy, a very close alliance, 

 between those two sciences of botany and zoology which 

 deal with living beings, while they are much more widely 

 separated from all other studies. It is due to Bufifon to 

 remark that he clearly recognised this great fact. He 

 says : " ces deux genres d'etres organisds [les animaux et 

 les vdgdtaux] ont beaucoup plus de proprietds communes 

 que de differences rdelles." Therefore, it is not won- 

 derful that, at the beginning of the present century, and 

 oddly enough in two different countries, and so far as I 

 know, without any intercommunication, two famous men 

 clearly conceived the notion of uniting the sciences which 

 deal with living matter into one whole, and of dealing with 

 them as one discipline. In fact I may say there were 

 three men to whom this idea occurred contemporaneously, 

 although there were but two who carried it into effect, and 

 only one who worked it out completely. The persons to 



M ;? 



