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( Naturalist)
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards the observational than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals.[1] Grouped among the natural sciences, Natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms. That is a very broad designation in a world filled with many narrowly focused disciplines, so while modern natural history dates historically from studies in the ancient Greco-Roman world and then the medieval Arabic world through to the scattered European Renaissance scientists working in near isolation, today's field is more of a cross discipline umbrella of many specialty sciences that like geobiology have a strong multi-disciplinary nature combining scientists and scientific knowledge of many specialty sciences. Today, well into the scientific revolution, natural history is sometimes considered an archaic term in the scientific community, since in its cross-discipline form usually leans toward the observational rather than the experimental, and encompasses more research that is published in general information (popular) magazines than in academic journals.[3] As an umbrella science, this is perhaps inevitable, and such cross disciplinary articles have their counterpart papers in many professional journal's as well—which are frequently cited in the popular articles. That many advances, even in specialties, could not have been made without such cross-fertilization of strong points is beyond contestation. No one thirty years ago could have foreseen how genetics, has remade and impacted other science, nor radiometrics and other analytical methods that have proved useful in many fields. In the past, during the heyday of the gentleman scientists, Natural history was strongly associated with (and hardly distinguished from) natural philosophy for many figures contributed in both areas and early papers of both fields were commonly read at early professional science societies meetings such as the Royal Society and French Academy of Sciences—both founded during the early industrial revolution in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, natural history, as a term, was frequently used to refer to all descriptive aspects of the study of nature—what today are called natural sciences—as opposed to political, ecclesiastical or other human-related history. In that era, where knowledge was divided into two main branches, the humanities including theology— which was considered by far the most important discipline in the mindset of the age until circa the late seventeenth century— and the studies of nature, it was the counterpart to the analytical study of nature, natural philosophy, which today we call the physical sciences. Spurred by the industrial revolution, the later became ascendant, natural history grew alongside it—mostly spurred by needs to analyze rock strata and find mineable mineral deposits, and the modern world gradually took place with a very different set of priorities and mindsets, as new sciences such as psychology emerged with expanding knowledge.
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