Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
But as science made the marvellous progress which it did make at the
latter end of the last and the beginning of the present century,
thinking men began to discern that under this title of "Natural
History" there were included very heterogeneous constituents--that, for
example, geology and mineralogy were, in many respects, widely
different from botany and zoology; 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 or mineralogy, and
_vice versâ_; and, further as knowledge advanced, it became clear
that there was a great analogy, a very close alliance, between those
two sciences, of botany and zoology which deal with human beings, while
they are much more widely separated from all other studies. It is due
to Buffon to remark that he clearly recognised this great fact. He
says: "Ces deux genres d'êtres 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 present
century, in two different countries, and so far as I know, without any
intercommunication, two famous men clearly conceived the notion of
uniting 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 occurred contemporaneously, although there
were but two who carried it into effect, and only one who worked it out
completely. The persons to whom I refer were the eminent physiologist
Bichat, and the great naturalist Lamarck, in France; and a
distinguished German, Treviranus. Bichat [1] assumed the existence of a
special group of "physiological" sciences. Lamarck, in a work published
in 1801, [2] for the first time made use of the name "Biologie," from
the two Greek words which signify a discourse upon life and living
things. About the same time, it occurred to Treviranus, that all those
sciences which deal with living matter are essentially and
fundamentally one, and ought to be treated as a whole; and, in the year
1802, he published the first volume of what he also called "Biologie."
Treviranus's great merit lies in this, that he worked out his idea, and
wrote the very remarkable book to which I refer. It consists of six
volumes, and occupied its author for twenty years--from 1802 to 1822.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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