ABSTRACT
The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and the controversy that it ignited have overshadowed other aspects of the development of the life sciences during the nineteenth century, a period in which the new science of biology replaced traditional natural history and the study of nature became the domain of the professional scientist. The term biology, which was first introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was popularized in the writings of the French zoologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (17441829) and the German naturalist Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776-1837). According to Lamarck, biology encompassed the study of all that pertained to living bodies, their organization, development, special organs, and vital movements. In describing the goals of a new science of life, Treviranus predicted that, in contrast to the old natural history, biology would organize all observations of vital phenomena into a unified and harmonious whole. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the French social philosopher, considered biology one of the principal sciences of positive philosophy. The idea of progress was central to Comte’s system, and his law of the three stages called for the intellectual evolution of humankind from theological to metaphysical and finally to scientific knowledge. His classification of the sciences was based on their increasing complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, to biology and sociology. Biologists were urged to turn away from work that was merely descriptive toward the study of the vital functions of plants and animals. Eighteenth-century naturalists had exemplified that era’s passion for the accumulation and classification of masses of facts about plants, animals, and peoples from all over the world, but the new task of biologists was to apply physical theories to the rational solution of physiological problems.
