History
Originally, physiology focused primarily on human beings, in large part from a desire to improve medical practices. When physiologists first began comparing different species it was sometimes out of simple curiosity to understand how organisms work but also stemmed from a desire to discover basic physiological principles. This use of specific organisms convenient to study specific questions is known as the Krogh Principle.
Read more about this topic: Comparative Physiology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)