Concept
Natural History (Pliny)
Overview
The Natural History (Latin: Naturalis historia) is a Latin work by Pliny the Elder. The largest single work to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day, the Natural History compiles information gleaned from other ancient authors. Despite the work's title, its subject area is not limited to what is today understood by natural history; Pliny himself defines his scope as "the natural world, or life". It is encyclopedic in scope, but its structure is not like that of a modern encyclopedia. It is the only work by Pliny to have survived, and the last that he published. He published the first 10 books in AD 77, but had not made a final revision of the remainder at the time of his death during the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. The rest was published posthumously by Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger.
The work is divided into 37 books, organised into 10 volumes. These cover topics including astronomy, mathematics, geography, ethnography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, horticulture, pharmacology, mining, mineralogy, sculpture, art, and precious stones.
Pliny's Natural History became a model for later encyclopedias and scholarly works as a result of its breadth of subject matter, its referencing of original authors, and its index.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The other and more general departments of natural history will rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, etc., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond…
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection
Names Natural History twice; opens on Natural History.
Its meaning, its character, its force, is known when, and only when, it is considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in some specific situation. This analysis is carried out by tracing successive stages of development--by endeavoring to locate the particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to changing…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Names Natural History several times.
The apparent indefiniteness and inconsistency of the classifications and definitions of Natural History belongs, in a far higher degree, to all other except mathematical speculations; and the modes in which approximations to exact distinctions and general truths have been made in Natural History, may be worthy our attention, even for the light they throw upon the best modes of pursuing truth of all kinds. “Though in…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
Names Natural History several times.
Philosophers who discussed Natural History (Pliny)
- Anaximander
- Thales of Miletus
- Dicaearchus
- Cristoforo Landino
- Nigidius Figulus
- Philip of Opus
- Papirius Fabianus
- Émile Littré
Related ideas
- Epigram
- Aphrodite
- Athens
- Galen
- Harvard University Press
- Hippocrates
- Herodotus
- Hadrian
- Philosophy
- Alcuin
- Etymologiae
- History of science
- Immanuel Kant
- Nuremberg Chronicle
- Ethnography
- Isidore of Seville
- Julius Caesar
- Jerome
- John Cassian
- Xenocrates
- Latin
- Cosmology
- Mathematics
- Geography
Place in the tradition
Part of Anaximander.