世界名著-OntheStudyofZoology.doc

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Annual most popular English classics, hope for your study help, support baidu, hope baidu library collections more and more good. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ On the Study of Zoology by Thomas H. Huxley NATURAL HISTORY is the name familiarly applied to the study of the properties of such natural bodies as minerals, plants, and animals; the sciences which embody the knowledge man has acquired upon these subjects are commonly termed Natural Sciences, in contradistinction to other so-called physical sciences; and those who devote themselves especially to the pursuit of such sciences have been and are commonly termed Naturalists. Linnaeus was a naturalist in this wide sense, and his Systema Naturae was a work upon natural history, in the broadest acceptation of the term; in it, that great methodising spirit embodied all that was known in his time of the distinctive characters of minerals, animals, and plants. But the enormous stimulus which Linnaeus gave to the investigation of nature soon rendered it impossible that any one man should write another Systema Naturae, and extremely difficult for any one to become even a naturalist such as Linnaeus was. Great as have been the advances made by all the three branches of science, of old included under the title of natural history, there can be no doubt that zoology and botany have grown in an enormously greater ratio than mineralogy; and hence, as I suppose, the name of natural history has gradually become more and more definitely attached to these prominent divisions of the subject, and by naturalist people have meant more and more distinctly to imply a student of the structure and function of living beings. However this may be, it is certain that the advance of knowledge has gradually widened the distance between mineralogy and its old