History of zoology through 1859

The history of zoology before Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of evolution traces the organized study of the
animal kingdom from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of zoology as a single coherent field
arose much later, systematic study of zoology is seen in the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient
Greco-Roman world. This work was developed in the Middle Ages by Islamic medicine and scholarship,
and in turn their work was extended by European scholars such as Albertus Magnus.

During the European Renaissance and early modern period, zoological thought was revolutionized in
Europe by a renewed interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel organisms. Prominent in this
movement were the anatomist Vesalius and the physiologist William Harvey, who used experimentation
and careful observation, and naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Buffon who began to classify the
diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as the development and behavior of organisms. Microscopy
revealed the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork for cell theory. The
growing importance of natural theology, partly a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy, encouraged
the growth of natural history (although it entrenched the argument from design).

Over the 18th and 19th centuries, zoology became increasingly professional scientific disciplines. Explorer-
naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt investigated the interaction between organisms and their
environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography—laying the foundations for
biogeography, ecology and ethology. Naturalists began to reject essentialism and consider the importance
of extinction and the mutability of species. Cell theory provided a new perspective on the fundamental basis
of life. These developments, as well as the results from embryology and paleontology, were synthesized in
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1859, Darwin placed the theory of organic
evolution on a new footing, by his discovery of a process by which organic evolution can occur, and
provided observational evidence that it had done so.

Contents
Pre-scientific zoology
Ancient eastern cultures
Ancient Greek traditions
Aristotelian zoology
Aristotle
Hellenistic zoology
Medieval and Islamic zoology
Renaissance and early modern
From anatomy to systematic taxonomy
Impact of the microscope
In advance of On the Origin of Species
See also
References
Sources
Pre-scientific zoology
The earliest humans must have had and passed on knowledge
about animals to increase their chances of survival. This may have
included unsystematic knowledge of human and animal anatomy
and aspects of animal behavior (such as migration patterns). People
learnt more about animals with the Neolithic Revolution about
10,000 years ago. Humans domesticated animals as people became
pastoralists and then farmers instead of hunter-gatherers in
civilisations such as those of ancient Egypt.[1]
An ancient Egyptian plows his fields
with a pair of oxen, used as beasts
Ancient eastern cultures of burden and a source of food.

The ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indian subcontinent, and

China, among others, produced renowned surgeons and students of the natural sciences such as Susruta
and Zhang Zhongjing, reflecting independent sophisticated systems of natural philosophy. Taoist
philosophers, such as Zhuangzi in the 4th century BC, expressed ideas related to evolution, such as
denying the fixity of biological species and speculating that species had developed differing attributes in
response to differing environments.[2] The ancient Indian Ayurveda tradition independently developed the
concept of three humours, resembling that of the four humours of ancient Greek medicine, though the
Ayurvedic system included further complications, such as the body being composed of five elements and
seven basic tissues. Ayurvedic writers also classified living things into four categories based on the method
of birth (from the womb, eggs, heat & moisture, and seeds) and explained the conception of a fetus in
detail. They also made considerable advances in the field of surgery, often without the use of human
dissection or animal vivisection.[3] One of the earliest Ayurvedic treatises was the Sushruta Samhita,
attributed to Sushruta in the 6th century BC. It was also an early materia medica, describing 700 medicinal
plants, 64 preparations from mineral sources, and 57 preparations based on animal sources.[4] However, the
roots of modern zoology are usually traced back to the secular tradition of ancient Greek philosophy.[5]

Ancient Greek traditions

The pre-Socratic philosophers asked many questions about life but produced little systematic knowledge of
specifically zoological interest—though the attempts of the atomists to explain life in purely physical terms
would recur periodically through the history of zoology. However, the medical theories of Hippocrates and
his followers, especially humorism, had a lasting impact.[6]

Aristotelian zoology

Aristotle

The philosopher Aristotle created the science of biology, basing its theory on both his metaphysical
principles and on observation. He proposed theories for the processes of metabolism, temperature
regulation, information processing, embryonic development and inheritance. He made detailed observations
of nature, especially the habits and attributes of animals in the sea at Lesbos. He classified 540 animal
species, and dissected at least 50.[7][8][9]
Aristotle, and nearly all Western scholars after him until the 18th
century, believed that creatures were arranged in a graded scale of
perfection rising from plants on up to humans: the scala naturae or
Great Chain of Being.[10]

Hellenistic zoology

A few scholars in the Hellenistic period under the Ptolemies—

particularly Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios—
Aristotle reported correctly that
amended Aristotle's physiological work, even performing electric rays were able to stun their
experimental dissections and vivisections.[11] Claudius Galen prey.
became the most important authority on medicine and anatomy.
Though a few ancient atomists such as Lucretius challenged the
teleological Aristotelian viewpoint that all aspects of life are the result of design or purpose, teleology (and
after the rise of Christianity, natural theology) remained central to biological thought until the 18th and 19th
centuries.[12]

Medieval and Islamic zoology

The decline of the Roman Empire led to the disappearance or destruction of

much knowledge, though physicians still incorporated many aspects of the
Aristotelian tradition into training and practice. In Byzantium and the
Islamic world, many of Aristotle's works were translated into Arabic and
commented upon by scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes.[13]

Medieval Muslim physicians, scientists and philosophers made significant

contributions to zoological knowledge between the 8th and 13th centuries
during the Islamic Golden Age. The Arab scholar al-Jahiz (781–869)
described early evolutionary ideas[14][15] such as the struggle for
existence.[16] He also introduced the idea of a food chain,[17] and was an
early adherent of environmental determinism.[18]
Frederick II's influential De
During the High Middle Ages, a few European scholars such as Hildegard arte venandi explored bird
of Bingen, Albertus Magnus and Frederick II expanded the natural history morphology.
canon. Magnus's De animalibus libri XXVI was one of the most extensive
studies of zoological observation published before modern times.[19][20]

Renaissance and early modern

From anatomy to systematic taxonomy

The Renaissance was the age of collectors and travellers, when many of the stories were actually
demonstrated as true when the living or preserved specimens were brought to Europe. Verification by
collecting of things, instead of the accumulation of anecdotes, then became more common, and scholars
developed a new faculty of careful observation. The Renaissance brought expanded interest in both
empirical natural history and physiology. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius inaugurated the modern era of Western
medicine with his seminal human anatomy treatise De humani corporis fabrica, which was based on
dissection of corpses. Vesalius was the first in a series of anatomists who gradually replaced scholasticism
with empiricism in physiology and medicine, relying on first-hand experience rather than authority and
abstract reasoning. Bestiaries—a genre that combines both the natural and
figurative knowledge of animals—also became more sophisticated. Conrad
Gessner great zoological work, Historiae animalium, appeared in four
volumes, 1551–1558, at Zürich, a fifth being issued in 1587. His works
were the starting-point of modern zoology. Other major works were
produced by William Turner, Pierre Belon, Guillaume Rondelet, and Ulisse
Aldrovandi.[21] Artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci,
often working with naturalists, were also interested in the bodies of animals
and humans, studying physiology in detail and contributing to the growth
of anatomical knowledge.[22]
Conrad Gesner (1516–1565).
In the 17th century, the enthusiasts of the new sciences, the investigators of His Historiae animalium is
nature by means of observation and experiment, banded themselves into considered the beginning of
academies or societies for mutual support and discourse. The first founded modern zoology.
of surviving European academies, the Academia Naturae Curiosorum
(1651) especially confined itself to the description and illustration of the
structure of plants and animals; eleven years later (1662) the Royal Society of London was incorporated by
royal charter, having existed without a name or fixed organisation for seventeen years previously (from
1645). A little later the Academy of Sciences of Paris was established by Louis XIV, later still the Royal
Society of Sciences in Uppsala was founded. Systematizing, naming and classifying dominated zoology
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Carl Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in
1735 (variations of which have been in use ever since), and in the 1750s introduced scientific names for all
his species.[23] While Linnaeus conceived of species as unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy, the other
great naturalist of the 18th century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, treated species as artificial
categories and living forms as malleable—even suggesting the possibility of common descent. Though he
was writing in an era before evolution existed, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary thought;
his "transformist" theory would influence the evolutionary theories of both Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and
Charles Darwin.[24]

Before the Age of Exploration, naturalists had little idea of the sheer scale of biological diversity. The
discovery and description of new species and the collection of specimens became a passion of scientific
gentlemen and a lucrative enterprise for entrepreneurs; many naturalists traveled the globe in search of
scientific knowledge and adventure.[25]

Extending the work of Vesalius into experiments on still living

bodies (of both humans and animals), William Harvey investigated
the roles of blood, veins and arteries. Harvey's De motu cordis in
1628 was the beginning of the end for Galenic theory, and
alongside Santorio Santorio's studies of metabolism, it served as an
influential model of quantitative approaches to physiology.[26]

Impact of the microscope Table of the Animal Kingdom

("Regnum Animale") from the 1st
In the early 17th century, the micro-world of zoology was just edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae
beginning to open up. A few lensmakers and natural philosophers (1735)
had been creating crude microscopes since the late 16th century,
and Robert Hooke published the seminal Micrographia based on
observations with his own compound microscope in 1665. But it was not until Antony van Leeuwenhoek's
dramatic improvements in lensmaking beginning in the 1670s—ultimately producing up to 200-fold
magnification with a single lens—that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria and the sheer
strangeness and diversity of microscopic life. Similar investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new
interest in entomology and built the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining.[27]
Debate over the flood described in the Bible catalyzed the development of paleontology; in 1669 Nicholas
Steno published an essay on how the remains of living organisms could be trapped in layers of sediment
and mineralized to produce fossils. Although Steno's ideas about fossilization were well known and much
debated among natural philosophers, an organic origin for all fossils would not be accepted by all
naturalists until the end of the 18th century due to philosophical and theological debate about issues such as
the age of the earth and extinction.[28]

Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological

thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed
to the central importance of the cell. In 1838 and 1839, Schleiden
and Schwann began promoting the ideas that (1) the basic unit of
organisms is the cell and (2) that individual cells have all the
characteristics of life, though they opposed the idea that (3) all cells
come from the division of other cells. Thanks to the work of Robert
Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, by the 1860s most
biologists accepted all three tenets of what came to be known as
cell theory.[29]
18th century microscopes from the
Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris.
In advance of On the Origin of Species
Up through the 19th century, the scope of zoology was largely divided between physiology, which
investigated questions of form and function, and natural history, which was concerned with the diversity of
life and interactions among different forms of life and between life and non-life. By 1900, much of these
domains overlapped, while natural history (and its counterpart natural philosophy) had largely given way to
more specialized scientific disciplines—cytology, bacteriology, morphology, embryology, geography, and
geology. Widespread travel by naturalists in the early-to-mid-19th century resulted in a wealth of new
information about the diversity and distribution of living organisms. Of particular importance was the work
of Alexander von Humboldt, which analyzed the relationship between organisms and their environment
(i.e., the domain of natural history) using the quantitative approaches of natural philosophy (i.e., physics
and chemistry). Humboldt's work laid the foundations of biogeography and inspired several generations of
scientists.[30]

The emerging discipline of geology also brought natural history

and natural philosophy closer together; Georges Cuvier and others
made great strides in comparative anatomy and paleontology in the
late 1790s and early 19th century. In a series of lectures and papers
that made detailed comparisons between living mammals and fossil
remains Cuvier was able to establish that the fossils were remains
of species that had become extinct—rather than being remains of
species still alive elsewhere in the world, as had been widely
believed.[31] Fossils discovered and described by Gideon Mantell,
William Buckland, Mary Anning, and Richard Owen among others
helped establish that there had been an 'age of reptiles' that had
preceded even the prehistoric mammals. These discoveries captured
Charles Darwin's first sketch of an the public imagination and focused attention on the history of life
evolutionary tree from his First on earth.[32]
Notebook on Transmutation of
Species (1837) Charles Darwin, combining the biogeographical approach of
Humboldt, the uniformitarian geology of Lyell, Thomas Malthus's
writings on population growth, and his own morphological
expertise, created a more successful evolutionary theory based on natural selection; similar evidence led
Alfred Russel Wallace to independently reach the same conclusions.[33] Charles Darwin's early interest in
nature led him on a five-year voyage on HMS Beagle which established him as an eminent geologist
whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his
journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.[34] Puzzled by the geographical distribution of
wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and
conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838.[35] Although he discussed his ideas with several
naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority.[36] He was writing
up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea,
prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.[37] Darwin's On the Origin of Species,
published on 24 November 1859, a seminal work of scientific literature, was to be the foundation of
evolutionary biology.

See also
List of zoologists
List of Russian zoologists
Important Publications in Zoology
Timeline of zoology

References
1. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 2–3
2. Needham, Joseph; Ronan, Colin Alistair (1995). The Shorter Science and Civilisation in
China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham's Original Text, Vol. 1. Cambridge University
Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-521-29286-3.
3. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, p. 6
4. Girish Dwivedi, Shridhar Dwivedi (2007). "History of Medicine: Sushruta – the Clinician –
Teacher par Excellence" (https://web.archive.org/web/20081010045900/http://medind.nic.in/i
ae/t07/i4/iaet07i4p243.pdf) (PDF). National Informatics Centre. Archived from the original (ht
tp://medind.nic.in/iae/t07/i4/iaet07i4p243.pdf) (PDF) on 2008-10-10. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
5. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 3–9
6. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 9–27
7. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 84–90, 135
8. Mason, A History of the Sciences, pp 41–44
9. Leroi, Armand Marie (2014). The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. Bloomsbury.
pp. 370–373. ISBN 978-1-4088-3622-4.
10. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 201–202; see also: Lovejoy, The Great Chain of
Being
11. Barnes, Hellenistic Philosophy and Science, p 383–384
12. Annas, Classical Greek Philosophy, p 252
13. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 91–94
14. Mehmet Bayrakdar, "Al-Jahiz And the Rise of Biological Evolutionism", The Islamic
Quarterly, Third Quarter, 1983, London.
15. Paul S. Agutter & Denys N. Wheatley (2008). Thinking about Life: The History and
Philosophy of Biology and Other Sciences. Springer. p. 43. ISBN 978-1-4020-8865-0.
16. Conway Zirkle (1941), Natural Selection before the "Origin of Species", Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 84 (1): 71–123.
17. Frank N. Egerton, "A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 6: Arabic Language Science -
Origins and Zoological", Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, April 2002: 142–146
[143]
18. Lawrence I. Conrad (1982), "Taun and Waba: Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in
Early Islam", Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25 (3), pp. 268–307
[278].
19. Albertus Magnus. On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica. The Review of Metaphysics |
December 01, 2001 | Tkacz, Michael W.
20. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 91–94:

"As far as biology as a whole is concerned, it was not until the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century that the universities became centers of biological
research."

21. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp 166–171

22. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 80–83
23. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 4
24. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 7
25. See Raby, Bright Paradise
26. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 103–113
27. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, pp 133–144
28. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, pp 41–93
29. Sapp, Genesis, chapter 7; Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, chapters 2
30. Bowler, The Earth Encompassed, pp 204–211
31. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, pp 112–113
32. Bowler, The Earth Encompassed, pp 211–220
33. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, chapter 10: "Darwin's evidence for evolution and
common descent"; and chapter 11: "The causation of evolution: natural selection"; Larson,
Evolution, chapter 3
34. Desmond & Moore 1991, pp. 210, 284–285
35. Desmond & Moore 1991, pp. 263–274
36. van Wyhe, John (2007). "Mind the gap : did Darwin avoid publishing his theory for many
years?". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 61 (2): 177–207.
doi:10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171 (https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsnr.2006.0171).
37. Beddall, B. G. (1968). "Wallace, Darwin, and the Theory of Natural Selection". Journal of the
History of Biology. 1 (2): 261–323. doi:10.1007/BF00351923 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF
00351923).

Sources
Desmond, Adrian J.; Moore, James (1991). Darwin. Warner Books.

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