Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

By the 1760s, men and women in Great Britain, and throughout Europe, were practicing various life and earth sciences in a wide range of social settings. The umbrella term “natural history” defined this large body of practices, understood not as “science” but as a descriptive approach to the study of nature that included collecting (and/or selling) specimens, classifying them, and writing and reading natural history texts. Natural philosophy, in its prestigious Newtonian form, provided the explanatory counterpart to natural history; for some contemporaries natural history was only a supplement to the laws of nature posited by Newtonian physics. Before 1800, natural history was not evolutionary and even today can still be understood “without reference to time” (OED) , in a sense that survives from the Latin root historia . But as its popularity grew, the status and temporal scope of natural history expanded dramatically. By the mid-eighteenth century natural history already had a celebrity to rival Newton, in the Swedish professor Carolus Linnaeus. The vast influence of Linnaeus's System of Nature (1735) eventually led to new applications of natural knowledge in domains ranging from mining to colonial plant transfer – both especially crucial to Britain's global influence in the late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century new institutions were in place for the study ... log in or subscribe to read full text