ABSTRACT
In A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History, the roving naturalist William Swainson set out to define how natural history differs from natural philosophy. Swainson's attempt to define natural history as a science is revealing both in its conviction and its imprecision. Natural history, encompassing zoology, botany and palaeontology, together with mineralogy, was at once the most ubiquitous and the most established of the sciences. The two English scientists who would contribute most to fulfilling Swainson's promise that natural history could be a systematic science were themselves products of this amateurish culture. The transition from natural history to biology entailed the professionalization and the secularization of the life sciences. Three books published around 1800 establish the terms of reference for nineteenth-century natural history. The sheer bulk of the scholarship on Victorian literature in relation to evolution testifies to the reach and intensity of the debates sparked off by Chambers and Darwin.
