were inapplicable.  Under these circumstances the old name of “Natural History” stuck by the residuum, by those phenomena which were not, at that time, susceptible of mathematical or experimental treatment; that is to say, those phenomena of nature which come now under the general heads of physical geography, geology, mineralogy, the history of plants, and the history of animals.  It was in this sense that the term was understood by the great writers of the middle of the last century—­Buffon and Linnaeus—­by Buffon in his great work, the “Histoire Naturelle Generale,” and by Linnaeus in his splendid achievement, the “Systema Naturae.”  The subjects they deal with are spoken of as “Natural History,” and they called themselves and were called “Naturalists.”  But you will observe that this was not the original meaning of these terms; but that they had, by this time, acquired a signification widely different from that which they possessed primitively.

The 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 northern universities, chairs of “Civil and Natural History,” in which “Natural History” is used to indicate exactly what Hobbes and Bacon meant by that term.  The unhappy incumbent of the chair of Natural History is, or was, supposed to cover the whole ground of geology, mineralogy, and zoology, perhaps even botany, in his lectures.

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 versa; 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 living 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’etres organises [les animaux et les vegetaux] ont beaucoup plus de proprietes communes que de differences reelles.”  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