The Centennial Museum is a Natural and Cultural History Museum. "Cultural history" easily translates into a focus on past cultures, but natural history doesn't focus on the past. When the term "natural history" came into use, "history" meant a systematic account, and so natural history was a systematic description of nature. Obviously, the Museum description speaks with a forked tongue!
So what is meant by natural history? David Starr Jordan's 1916
definition still pretty much works. It reads, "By old-fashioned natural history, I
mean the recognition or study of animals and plants, as completed organisms, each
greater than the sum of all the parts. It involves knowledge of names and of some
degree of classification. It leads up to the problem of the origin of species, the
affinities of forms, of the complex relations we call habits, the problems of
geological and geographical distribution, the details of evolution and a balanced
knowledge of things as they are, as actual though temporary stages in a university of
change. It is at once the beginning and the end of biological study."
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.