History of biology

As soon as men began to raise plants in gardens, or even earlier, they must have remarked that plants produce seeds, and that seeds develop into new plants. The Greeks (Empedocl...

Aristotle found himself obliged to rectify the traditional classification of animals in order to remove gross anomalies. When learning decayed the traditional classification cam...

In 1787 Sprengel had remarked that the bases of the petals of Geranium silvaticum are beset with long hairs. Persuaded that no natural structure can be devoid of meaning, Spreng...

Common observation taught men in very early times that green plants draw nourishment from the soil, and that sunlight is necessary to their health. In the age of Galileo a Belgi...

Most writers call this method _historical_, because history is the chief means by which it seeks to trace causes. Others call it _genetic_, because it goes back, whenever it can...

Any one of the higher animals or plants admits of analysis into _organs_, each adapted to one or more functions. Bichât (1801) showed that the body of one of the higher animals...

The dissection of the sting, the proboscis, and the compound eye of the bee was a task after Swammerdam's own heart, but so intricate that all his patience and skill could not s...

After some fifteen or twenty years spent in European society, the inspiration drawn from long and arduous journeys in South America began to fail. The conversation of the _salon...

Produced by Jwala Kumar Sista, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by...

_Darwin on Adaptations._—The adaptation of living things to their surroundings has always been a favourite branch of natural history, underrated only by those whose studies are...