236 Dr. T. Sterry Hunt on the 



the encomium pronounced by Aristotle that he was the first 

 philosopher who had written soberly of nature. 



§ 7. We find the word physiology and its derivatives em- 

 ployed in the same general sense by English writers in the 

 seventeenth century. Thus, Cudworth speaks of "the old 

 physiologers before Aristotle/' and writes " They who first 

 theologized did physiologize after this manner, inasmuch as 

 they made the Ocean and Tethys to have been the original of 

 generation"*; while Henry Moore says, " It will necessarily 

 follow that the Mosaical philosophy, in the physiological part 

 of it, is the same with the Cartesian "t« Coming down to 

 later writers, we find the word physiologist used in a general 

 sense, as equivalent to our modern term naturalist. Thus, 

 Dugald Stewart calls Cuvier " the most eminent and original 

 physiologist of the present age;" and Burke writes, "The 

 national menagerie is collected by the first physiologists of the 

 time"|. 



We may note in this connexion the two series of abridg- 

 ments of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society — 

 the first, from its commencement to 1700, and the second, to 

 1720, both published with the impiimatur of Newton, as presi- 

 dent of the Society. In these collections the classification of 

 the papers is as follows : — (1) "Mathematical" including pure 

 and applied mathematics ; (2) u Physiological" embracing 

 all meteorological phenomena, tides, terrestrial magnetism, 

 mineralogy, geology, botany, zoology, and the study of the 

 physical world in general. Subjects relating to the human 

 body, however, such as anatomy and medicine, were excluded 

 from part 2, and, with chemistry, made a first division of 

 part 3, in the second and last division of which were included 

 philological and miscellaneous papers. 



§ 8. Of the "special and particular physiology," as distin- 

 guished by Phillips, 'we have an example in Glanvil, who, in 

 the seventeenth century, writes of the physiology of comets §. 

 The citation from Burke, identifying physiologists with zoolo- 

 gists, may also perhaps be taken as an example of a special 

 use of the word ; while in later times we have come to speak 

 of Vegetable Physiology, Animal Physiology, Human Phy- 

 siology, and even of Mental Physiology, a term employed by 



* 'Intellectual System/ pp. 120, 171. 



t ' Philosophical Cabbala/ Appendix, c. 1. 



I Stewart, 'Philosophy of the Human Mind,' ii. c. 4; and Burke, 

 1 Letter to a Noble Lord.' 



§ " So that we need not be appalled at blazing stars, and a comet is no 

 more ground for astrological presages than a flaming chimney. The un- 

 paralleled Descartes hath unravelled their dark physiology, and to wonder 

 solved their motions. 1 ' (Jos. Glanvil, ' Scepsis Scientifica, .... an Essay 

 on the Vanity of Dogmatizing,' 1665, c. xx.) 



