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Origin and Meaning of the Term ' Biology.' 



The word 'biology,' which is now so familiar as comprising the snm 

 of the knowledge which has as yet been acquired concerning living 

 nature, was unknown until after the beginning of the present century. 

 The term was first employed by Treviranus, who proposed to himself as 

 a life-task the development of a new science, the aim of which should be 

 to study the forms and phenomena of life, its origin and the conditions 

 and laws of its existence, and embodied what was known on these subjects 

 in a book of seven volumes, which he entitled ' Biology, or the Philosophy 

 of Living Nature.' For its construction the material was very scanty, 

 and was chiefly derived from the anatomists and physiologists. For 

 botanists were entirely occupied in completing the work which Linnaeus 

 had begun, and the scope of zoology was in like manner limited to the 

 description and classification of animals. It was a new thing to regard 

 the study of living nature as a science by itself, worthy to occupy a place 

 by the side of natural philosophy, and it was therefore necessary to vindi- 

 cate its claim to such a position. Treviranus declined to found this claim 

 on its useful applications to the arts of agriculture and medicine, con- 

 sidering that to regard any subject of study in relation to our bodily 

 wants — in other words to utility — was to narrow it, but dwelt rather 

 on its value as a discipline and on its surpassing interest. He commends 

 biology to his readers as a study which, above all others, ' nourishes and 

 maintains the taste for simplicity and nobleness ; which affords to the 

 intellect ever new material for reflection, and to the imagination an in- 

 exhaustible source of attractive images. ' 



Being himself a mathematician as well as a naturalist, he approaches 

 the subject both from the side of natural philosophy and from that of 

 natural history, and desires to found the new science on the fundamental 

 distinction between living and non-living material. In discussing this 

 distinction, he takes as his point of departure the constancy with which 

 the activities which manifest themselves in the universe are balanced, 

 emphasising the impossibility of excluding from that balance the vital 

 activities of plants and animals. The difference between vital and 

 physical processes he accordingly finds, not in the nature of the processes 

 themselves, but in their co-ordination; that is, in their adaptedness to 

 a given purpose, and to the peculiar and special relation in which the 

 organism stands to the external world. All of this is expressed in a pro- 

 position diflBicult to translate into English, in which he defines life as 

 consisting in the reaction of the organism to extei'nal influences, and 

 contrasts the uniformity of vital reactions with the variety of their 

 exciting causes.' 



' ' Leben bestelit in der Gleichformigkeit der Reaktionen bei ungleichformigen 

 Einwirkungen der Aussenwelt.' — Treviranus, Biologie oder PhilvsojjMe der lebenden 

 Natur, Gottingen, 1802, vol. i. p. 83. 



