210 On the Study of Biology. [ April, 
ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY? 
BY PROF. T. H. HUXLEY. 
HE sense in which “ natural history ” was used at the time I 
am now speaking of has, to a certain extent, endured to the 
present day. There are now in existence, in some of our north- 
ern universities, chairs of civil and natural history, in which 
the term 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 geology and 
mineralogy, zodlogy, perhaps even botany, in his lectures. But 
as science made the marvelous progress which it did make at the 
end of the last and the beginning of the present century, think- 
ing men began to discern that under this title of natural his- 
tory there were included very heterogeneous constituents, — 
that, for example, geology and mineralogy were, in many re- 
spects, very different from botany and zodlogy ; that a man might 
obtain an extensive knowledge of the structure and functions of 
plants and animals without having need to enter upon the study 
of geology and mineralogy, and vice versa; and further, as knowl- 
edge advanced, it became clear that there was a great analogy, 4 
very close alliance, between those two sciences of botany and zo- 
ology which deal with living beings, while they are much more 
widely separated from all other studies. It is due to Buffon to 
remark that he clearly recognized this great fact. He says: “ Ces 
deux genres d’étres organisés (les animaux et les végétaux) ont 
beaucoup plus de propriétés communes que de différences réelles.” 
Therefore it is not wonderful that at the beginning of the pres- 
ent century, and oddly enough in two different countries, and, 50 
far as I know, without any intercommunication between the re- 
spective writers, two famous men clearly conceived the notion of 
uniting the whole of 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 oceurre 
contemporaneously, although there were but two who carried 1t 
into effect, and only one who worked it out completely. m 
persons to whom I refer were the eminent physiologist Bichat, 
the great naturalist Lamarck, in France, and a distinguish 
1 Extracts from a lecture by Professor Huxley, delivered at the South Kensington 
Museum, on Saturday, December 16, 1876. M 
2 See the distinction between the “ sciences physiques ” and the ‘‘ sciences physio- 
logiques ” in the Anatomie Générale, 1801. i 
