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
associates, while it has drawn zoology and botany closer together; so
that of late years it has been found convenient (and indeed necessary)
to associate the sciences which deal with vitality and all its
phenomena under the common head of "biology"; and the biologists have
come to repudiate any blood-relationship with their foster-brothers,
the mineralogists.

Certain broad laws have a general application throughout both the animal
and the vegetable worlds, but the ground common to these kingdoms of
nature is not of very wide extent, and the multiplicity of details is
so great, that the student of living beings finds himself obliged to
devote his attention exclusively either to the one or the other. If he
elects to study plants, under any aspect, we know at once what to call
him. He is a botanist, and his science is botany. But if the
investigation of animal life be his choice, the name generally applied
to him will vary according to the kind of animals he studies, or the
particular phenomena of animal life to which he confines his
attention. If the study of man is his object, he is called an
anatomist, or a physiologist, or an ethnologist; but if he dissects
animals, or examines into the mode in which their functions are
performed, he is a comparative anatomist or comparative physiologist.
If he turns his attention to fossil animals, he is a palaeontologist.