Natural history once covered everything, from the stars to human superstition
When Pliny the Elder published his Natural History around 77 to 79 AD, it took in astronomy, geography, medicine, human inventions and superstition along with plants and animals. Since then the term has steadily shrunk even as the word nature has grown, and its practitioners were eventually brushed aside as mere amateurs.
Today the phrase describes the study of living things such as animals, plants and fungi where they live, relying on watching more than experimenting; its practitioners are naturalists. The English term translates the Latin historia naturalis. Medieval European scholars split knowledge into the humanities and divinity and learned about nature mainly from books. The Renaissance revived direct study and added a third branch, which divided into descriptive natural history, covering biology and geology, and analytical natural philosophy, the forerunner of physics and chemistry. Early papers in both were read at the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, each founded in the 17th century.
Some texts lasted astonishingly long. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Roman physician of Greek origin, wrote De Materia Medica between 50 and 70 AD, and it stayed in use for more than 1,500 years. From the Greeks until Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, naturalists ranked everything from minerals to humans on the Great Chain of Being, a single ladder of supposed perfection. Europe stood fairly still in the Middle Ages while the Arab world moved faster, and Joseph Needham later hailed Li Shizhen, author of the Bencao gangmu, as the uncrowned king of Chinese naturalists.
Practical aims drove much of the work. Linnaeus hoped to improve Sweden's economy, and the Industrial Revolution pushed geology forward to locate mineral deposits. Renaissance herbalists such as Leonhart Fuchs amassed specimens, English parson-naturalists including Gilbert White often wrote to argue for divine goodness, and many women contributed, especially in botany, as authors, collectors and illustrators.
As botany, geology, zoology and other disciplines professionalised, specialists began to treat natural history as a pastime rather than proper science. In Britain and America it became birdwatching, butterfly collecting and shell hunting, and Victorian Scots thought it good for mental health. Its habits survive in ecology, ethology and evolutionary biology, and amateur collectors helped stock giants such as the Natural History Museum in London. Definitions still vary widely; Thomas Fleischner calls it focused attentiveness to the more-than-human world and argues it is the oldest continuous human endeavour.
Source: Natural history
