"The positivist and rationalist history of science guided the production and selection of personas and topics... of scientific works that appeared in the nineteenth century, especially at its close. As in the eighteenth century, these histories were written less in the service of history than of science.... Guided by chronology rather than narrative, these histories took the study of nature out of its historical context and ordered results, investigations, and families of problems according to their relative success in maintaining a position in the corpus of scientific knowledge. Value judgements condemning certain traditions, like Naturphilosophie, to the historical trashcan were therefore inevitable. Written not by trained historians but by scientists, philosophers, and others whose avocation was history, these histories fell outside the range of even history's historiography and methodology. Rarely did they employ historical categories more complex than the "views of nature" used by John Theodore Merz in A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (four volumes, 1903-1914) to parse scientific discoveries into like-minded groups."