Description

Natural history involves the research and formation of statements that make elements of life and life styles comprehensible by describing the relevant structures, operations and circumstances of various species, such as diet, reproduction, and social grouping.[2] The term has grown to be an umbrella term for what are now often viewed as several distinct scientific disciplines of integrative organismal biology. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and climatology.
Today, well into the scientific revolution, natural history is sometimes considered an archaic term in the scientific community, since in its cross-discipline form usually leans toward the observational rather than the experimental, and encompasses more research that is published in general information (popular) magazines than in academic journals.[1] As an umbrella science, this is perhaps inevitable, and such cross disciplinary articles have their counterpart papers in many professional journals as well—which are frequently cited in the popular articles. That many advances, even in specialties, could not have been made without such cross-fertilization of strong points is beyond contestation. No one thirty years ago could have foreseen how genetics, has remade and impacted other science, nor radiometrics and other analytical methods that have proved useful in many fields.
In the past, during the heyday of the gentleman scientists, natural history was strongly associated with (and hardly distinguished from) natural philosophy for many figures contributed in both areas and early papers of both fields were commonly read at early professional science societies meetings such as the Royal Society and French Academy of Sciences—both founded during the early industrial revolution in the seventeenth century.
In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, natural history, as a term, was frequently used to refer to all descriptive aspects of the study of nature—what today are called natural sciences—as opposed to political, ecclesiastical or other human-related history. In that era, where knowledge was divided into two main branches, the humanities including theology—which was considered by far the most important discipline in the mindset of the age until about the late seventeenth century—and the studies of nature, it was the counterpart to the analytical study of nature, natural philosophy, which today we call the physical sciences. Spurred by the industrial revolution, the later became ascendant, natural history grew alongside it—mostly spurred by needs to analyze rock strata and find mineable mineral deposits, and the modern world gradually took place with a very different set of priorities and mindsets, as new sciences such as psychology emerged with expanding knowledge.
Furthermore, in modern usage as a term, natural history's sense has become narrowed and more tightly focused, and more often refers to matters relating to biology (the study of living organisms such as plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc. and their relationships in natural systems)—but such also encompasses paleobiology, paleozoology, etcetera and so weds the field strongly with many earth sciences like geology and its disciplines such as stratigraphy and petrology. In contrast, until the twentieth century, it had the designation as the study of all things in the natural world, such as rocks and minerals (geology), atoms and molecules (chemistry), and even the universe at large (astronomy, physics, astrophysics), etc.
It has historically been an often somewhat haphazard or less strictly organized study, description, and classification of natural objects, such as animals, plants, minerals, and placed an importance and significance on fieldwork as opposed to the more systematic scientific investigation such as experimental or lab work.[3] A person interested in natural history is known as a naturalist or natural historian. Natural History is not now commonly applied to the fields of astronomy, physics, or chemistry.,[3] as briefly discussed above. However, it sometimes even includes the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology.
Natural history involves the research and formation of statements that make elements of life and the world of living beings comprehensible by describing the relevant structures, operations, relationships (in natural or "eco"systems, as well as the biosphere as a whole (i.e. the sum total of life on our planet))and circumstances of various species, such as diet, reproduction, and social grouping.[4] The term has grown to be an umbrella term for what are now often viewed as several distinct scientific disciplines of integrative organismal biology. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and climatology.