NATURAL HISTORY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does natural history mean? 

• NATURAL HISTORY (noun)
  The noun NATURAL HISTORY has 1 sense:

1. the scientific study of plants or animals (more observational than experimental) usually published in popular magazines rather than in academic journals

  Familiarity information: NATURAL HISTORY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• NATURAL HISTORY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The scientific study of plants or animals (more observational than experimental) usually published in popular magazines rather than in academic journals

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Hypernyms ("natural history" is a kind of...):

science; scientific discipline (a particular branch of scientific knowledge)

 Context examples 

A natural history study collects health information in order to understand how the medical condition or disease develops and how to treat it.

(Natural History, NCI Dictionary)

There were tigers and elephants and bears and wolves and foxes and all the others in the natural history, and for a moment Dorothy was afraid.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

We visited the wondrous cave and the little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Ecologic, natural history, or descriptive studies.

(Genetics (Treatment) Level of Evidence: 4, NCI Dictionary)

Judge Scott still held to the same opinion, and proved it to everybody's dissatisfaction by measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopaedia and various works on natural history.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Intramural and collaborative interdisciplinary studies are conducted on the distribution, causes, and natural history of cancer, and the means for its prevention.

(Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI Thesaurus)

By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)