Natural History 141through the creation of the myth of a longstanding rational and secular
“science” that had been engaged in a perennial warfare with theology.
So successful was this strategy that even now it is diffi cult to envisage a
natural history that from its inception in the sixteenth century to its de-
cline in the nineteenth, was often governed by theological principles and
pursued by those with theological motivations. As for the new alliance of
disciplines clustered under the umbrella “science,” there remain tensions,
but these are largely obscured by the standard usages of “science,” “sci-
entist,” “laws of nature” and “scientifi c method.” It cannot be assumed,
despite the rhetoric of advocates of a scientifi c biology, that the “laws”
that govern biological processes are close analogs of those that operate in
the realm of physics, as Chambers and Huxley seem to have held.^116 As
for the wide applicability of the term “scientist,” the Nobel Prize–winning
physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was said to have remarked once
that “scientists were divided into two categories—physicists and stamp
collectors.”^117 The place of biologists in this dichotomy is clear.
Apart from the professionalization of natural history, the nineteenth
century witnessed other important developments. Even before the ap-
pearance of On the Origin of Species, laboratory- based biological sciences
had gradually been assuming the role of the “scientifi c” study of nature.
Something of this process can be seen in the insistence of the editors
of the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie (Journal for Scientifi c Zool-
ogy), founded in 1848, who announced that their concern was to give
their new journal “the most scientifi c character possible.”^118 The editors
were quite specifi c in their desire to exclude descriptions of new species,
and “simple notes and natural history news,” their primary interests be-
ing morphology and physiology. Traditional natural historians, “mere
naturalists” as Huxley would have it, were advised to avoid disappoint-
ment and submit their unscientifi c dross elsewhere. Related to this was
the intensifi cation of scientifi c specialization, which helped ring in the
changes for natural history by undermining its unity. In the seventh
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1830–42), readers of the entry
“natural history” were for the fi rst time informed that this fi eld was now
divided into fi ve distinct disciplines: meteorology, hydrography, mineral-
ogy, botany, and zoology.^119 By now, experimental biology was fl ourish-
ing, and new research laboratories were built in the major centers and
universities. The venue of natural history, having been successively the
humanist’s library and the vicar’s country parish, became the scientist’s
laboratory. Such developments are suggestive of a transformation of
natural history into an experimentally based “science.” More accurately,
perhaps, natural history was simply eclipsed by the new “scientifi c biol-