il history; which is the
history of the voluntary actions of men in commonwealths."

So that all history of fact was divided into these two great groups of
natural and of civil history. The Royal Society was in course of
foundation about the time that Hobbes was writing this book, which was
published in 1651; and that Society was termed a "Society for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge," which was then nearly the same thing
as a "Society for the Improvement of Natural History." As time went on,
and the various branches of human knowledge became more distinctly
developed and separated from one another, it was found that some were
much more susceptible of precise mathematical treatment than others. The
publication of the "Principia" of Newton, which probably gave a greater
stimulus to physical science than any work ever published before, or
which is likely to be published hereafter, showed that precise
mathematical methods were applicable to those branches of science such
as astronomy, and what we now call physics, which occupy a very large
portion of the domain of what the older writers understood by natural
history. And inasmuch as the partly deductive and partly experimental
methods of treatment to which Newton and others subjected these branches
of human knowledge, showed that the phenomena of nature which belonged
to them were susceptible of explanation, and thereby came within the
reach of what was called "philosophy" in those days; so much of this
kind of knowledge as was not included under astronomy came to be spoken
of as "natural philosophy"--a term which Bacon had employed in a much
wider sense. Time went on, and yet other branches of science developed
themselves. Chemistry took a definite shape; and since all these
sciences, such as astronomy, natural philosophy, and chemistry, were
susceptible either of mathematical treatment or of experimental
treatment, or of both, a broad distinction was drawn between the
experimental branches of what had previously been called natural history
and the observational branches--those in which experiment was (or
appeared to be) of doubtful use, and where, at that time, mathematical
methods were inapplicable. Under these circumstances the old name of
"Natural History" stuck by the residuum, by those phenomena which were
not, at that time, susceptible of mathematical or experimental
treatment; that is to say, those phenomena of nature which come now
under the general head