Natural history covers, but is not limited to, scientific research. It involves the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. Thus, it goes back to observations of nature in ancient times, to medieval natural philosophers through naturalists of the European Renaissance to modern scientists. Natural history today is a cross-disciplinary field of knowledge that includes many disciplines, such as geobiology, paleobotany, etc.
Antiquity
Antiquity gave us the first real scientists in the world. The history of natural science begins with Aristotle and other ancient philosophers who analyzed the diversity of the natural world. However, their research was tied to mysticism and philosophy, not having a single system.
The “Natural History” of Pliny the Elder was the first work that covered everything that could be found in the world, including living beings, geology, astronomy, technology, art and humanity as such.
"De Materia Medica" was written between 50 and 70 years of our era by Dioscorides, a Roman physician of Greek origin. This book was popular for more than 1500 years, until it was abandoned in the Renaissance, making it one of the longest (in relevance) books on natural history.
From the ancient Greeks to the work of Karl Linnaeus and other naturalists of the 18th century, the main concept of this discipline was the Great Chain of Being, the arrangement of minerals, fruits, more primitive forms of animals and more complex forms of life on a linear scale, as part of the process leading to perfection, the culmination of which is our view. This idea became a kind of harbinger of the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The meaning of the English term natural history ("natural history", tracing paper from the Latin expression historia naturalis) has narrowed over time; while, on the contrary, the meaning of the related term nature ("nature") has expanded. The same applies to the Russian language. In Russian, the terms “natural history” and “natural science”, which were originally synonyms, were separated over time.
Knowledge of the term began to change during the Renaissance. In ancient times, “natural history” encompassed almost everything related to nature, or used materials created from nature. For example, the encyclopedia of Pliny the Elder, published about 77 to 79 AD e., which covers astronomy, geography, people and their technologies, medicine and superstition, as well as animals and plants.
Medieval European scholars believed that knowledge has two main sections: the humanities (primarily what is now known as philosophy and scholasticism) and theology, and science is studied mainly through texts, rather than observation or experiment.
Natural history was mostly popular in medieval Europe, although it developed at a much faster pace in the Arab and Eastern worlds. Since the thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle have been rather rigidly adapted to Christian philosophy, in particular by Thomas Aquinas, having formed the basis of natural theology. In the Renaissance, scientists (especially herbalists and humanists) returned to direct observation of plants and animals, and many began to accumulate large collections of exotic patterns and unusual monsters, but, as natural history later proved, dragons, manticores and other mythical creatures do not exist.
The advent of botany and the discovery of Linnaeus
The science of those times still continued to rely on classics. But not only the “Natural History” of Pliny lived the then scientific community. Leonhart Fuchs was one of the three founding fathers of botany, along with Otto Branfels and Jerome Bock. Other important contributors to this area were Valerius Kordus, Konrad Gesner (Historiae animalium), Frederic Ruysch and Gaspar Bauhin. The rapid increase in the number of known living organisms has caused many attempts to classify and organize species into taxonomic groups, culminating in the system of the Swedish naturalist Karl Linnaeus.
The study of nature was revived in the Renaissance and quickly became the third branch of academic knowledge, which itself is divided into descriptive natural history and natural philosophy, an analytical study of nature. In modern conditions, natural philosophy roughly corresponded to modern physics and chemistry, while history included biological and geological sciences. They were strongly interconnected.
New time
Natural history was encouraged by practical motives such as Linnaeus' desire to improve Sweden’s economic situation. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution prompted the development of geology, which could help find mineral deposits.
Astronomer William Herschel was also a natural historian. Instead of working with plants or minerals, he worked with stars. He spent time building telescopes to see the stars, and then he watched them. In the process, he made maps of all the stars and wrote down everything he saw (while his sister Caroline was documenting).
Union of Biology and Theology
Naturalists such as Gilbert White, William Kirby, John George Wood and John Ray, who wrote about plants, animals and other creatures of mother nature, made a significant contribution to English natural history. Many of these people wrote about nature in order to derive from their research a scientific and theological argument in favor of the existence or goodness of God.
From a major science to a prestigious hobby
In modern Europe, professional disciplines such as botany, geology, mycology, paleontology, physiology and zoology have already formed. Natural history, which had previously been the main subject of teaching professors at colleges, was increasingly despised by scientists with more specialized employment and related to "amateur" activities, and not to science. In Victorian Scotland, it was believed that its study contributed to good mental health. In particular, in the UK and the United States, this has grown into a popular hobby like amateur study of birds, butterflies, shells (malacology / conchology), beetles and wildflowers.
Branching biology into many disciplines
Meanwhile, scientists tried to determine a single discipline of biology (albeit with partial success, at least until modern evolutionary synthesis). Nevertheless, the traditions of natural history continue to play a role in the study of biology, especially ecology (the study of natural systems with the participation of living organisms and inorganic components of the Earth’s biosphere that support them), ethology (a scientific study of animal behavior), and evolutionary biology (the study of the relationship between life forms for very long periods of time, and with the efforts of amateur naturalists and collectors, the first thematic museums were created.
Three of the greatest nineteenth-century English naturalists — Henry Walter Bates, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russell Wallace — all knew each other. Each of them traveled around the world, spending years collecting thousands of copies, many of which were new to science, and their works presented science with advanced knowledge about the “remote” parts of the world: the Amazon basin, the Galapagos Islands and the Malay Archipelago. And thereby helped to transform biology from descriptive theory into scientific practice.
National Natural History Museums
Themed museums dedicated to this topic exist all over the world, and they have played an important role in the emergence of professional biological disciplines and research programs. In particular, in the 19th century, scientists began to use their scientific collections as educational tools for advanced students and as the basis for their own morphological research. In almost every city in Russia there are museums of natural history, Kazan, Moscow and St. Petersburg are among them in the first place. In the West, such museums are one of the favorite places for pilgrimage of tourists.