24 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



elude all we at present undertake. The Geological and Biological 

 Sections would have met as 07ie Section. 



It is a very interesting fact to remember that about this time 

 the Royal Society of England, whose monthly issue of their pro- 

 ceedings is regularly sent to enrich the library of this Association, 

 was founded about the time the writer above referred to published 

 his book. It was then called a " Society for the Improvement of 

 Natural Knowledge," which is nearly the same thing as a " Society 

 for the Improvement of Natural History." 



Of course, as time went on, and the various branches of know- 

 ledge more distinctly developed and separated from one another, it 

 was found that some were more susceptible of precise mathematical 

 treatment than others. 



The publication of Newton's " Principia," which I suppose gave 

 a greater impulse to the physical sciences than any book ever 

 pubhshed before or since, or, it might be said, any book likely 

 to be published in the future, showed that these precise mathemati- 

 cal methods were applicable to those branches of science such as 

 astronomy, and what we now call physics, which occupy a large por- 

 tion of the ground of what the older writers understood by Natural 

 History. Then chemistry was wrested from the hands of necro- 

 mancers and fortune-tellers and took definite shape, which helped to 

 lead to a distinction being made between the experimental and the 

 observational branches (excuse the term) of Natural History. 



It is evident, I thmk, that the term " Natural History " came 

 to be used about the middle of the last century for those phenomena 

 which were not at that time susceptible of mathematical or experi- 

 mental treatment. That would include those phenomena which 

 come under the general heads of physical geography (Hobbes' "re- 

 gions "), geology, mineralogy, the history of plants and the tiistory of 

 animals. 



About this time appeared several great naturalists. Among 

 others the great Linn^us, whose work, " Systema Naturse," is in our 

 Public Library. The subjects these men dealt with were spoken of 

 as Natural History, and they were called, and called themselves, 

 naturalists. But you will notice that this was not the original mean- 

 ing of the term Natural History. 



I think in some of the Scotch Universities there are still, or 

 there were at least some thirty years ago, chairs of Civil and Natural 



