The publication of the "Principia" of Newton, which probably gave a
greater stimulus to physical science than any work ever published
before, or which is likely to be published hereafter, showed that
precise mathematical methods were applicable to those branches of
science such as astronomy, and what we now call physics, which occupy a
very large portion of the domain of what the older writers understood
by natural history. And inasmuch as the partly deductive and partly
experimental methods of treatment to which Newton and others subjected
these branches of human knowledge, showed that the phenomena of nature
which belonged to them were susceptible of explanation, and thereby
came within the reach of what was called "philosophy" in those days; so
much of this kind of knowledge as was not included under astronomy came
to be spoken of as "natural philosophy"--a term which Bacon had
employed in a much wider sense. Time went on, and yet other branches of
science developed themselves. Chemistry took a definite shape; and
since all these sciences, such as astronomy, natural philosophy, and
chemistry, were susceptible either of mathematical treatment or of
experimental treatment, or of both, a broad distinction was drawn
between the experimental branches of what had previously been called
natural history and the observational branches--those in which
experiment was (or appeared to be) of doubtful use, and where, at that
time, mathematical methods were inapplicable. Under these circumstances
the old name of "Natural History" stuck by the residuum, by those
phenomena which were not, at that time, susceptible of mathematical or
experimental treatment; that is to say, those phenomena of nature which
come now under the general heads of physical geography, geology,
mineralogy, the history of plants, and the history of animals. It was
in this sense that the term was understood by the great writers of the
middle of the last century--Buffon and Linnaeus--by Buffon in his great
work, the "Histoire Naturelle Generale," and by Linnaeus in his