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, social grouping, and interactions with other species.^[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 organisms (i.e. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and climatology.

Nowadays, natural history is sometimes considered an archaic or popular term by scientists, since it is a cross-discipline form and encompasses research that is generally published within a subdiscipline, such as botany, ornithology, or geobiology.

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 to both topics and early papers of both fields were commonly read at professional science societies meetings such as the Royal Society and French Academy of Sciences—- both founded during the seventeenth century.

During the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, knowledge was considered by Europeans to be divided into two main parts: the humanities including theology, and the studies of nature. Natural history was the descriptive counterpart to the analytical study of nature-- natural philosophy, which we know nowadays as the physical sciences. However, natural history has been always encouraged by practical motives. For instance, the work of Linnaeus was strongly motivated by the desire to improve the economical condition of the Swedish kingdom ^[3]. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution prompted the development of the science of geology by the need to analyze rock strata (layers) to find mineral deposits ^[4]. Roughly, it may be said that natural philosophy corresponded to modern physics and chemistry, while natural history included the biological and geological sciences, although the terminology was and remains somewhat vague.

In modern usage as a term, natural history's sense has become restricted 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. By contrast, until the twentieth century, it had the designation as the study of all of 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.^[5] The term natural history is not now commonly applied to the fields of astronomy, physics, or chemistry,^[5] as briefly discussed above. However, it sometimes includes the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology.

“	Natural history is the scientific research of plants and animals in their natural environments. It is concerned with degrees of organization from individual organisms to an entire ecosystem, and emphasizes identification, life history, distribution, abundance, and inter-relationships. It may include an aesthetic component.	”
—Stephen G. Herman, 2002

The above quote illustrates the strong connection between natural history and the modern science of ecology.