36 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



EXPANSION OF THE USEFULNESS OF NATURAL HISTORY 



MUSEUMS 



By Professor THOMAS H. MONTGOMERY, Jr. 



THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



LIFE consists, to a large degree, in adjustments and responses, with 

 institutions as well as with individuals, and the new conditions 

 that these create must be faced in their turn. With every active growth 

 there is branching out and so arise innumerable interlacings and en- 

 tanglements of activities, one overlapping and interweaving with the 

 next. The whole history of thought shows how subjects that once 

 were to great extent isolated have spread out and crossed, until they 

 compose a tangled web of endeavor, and consequently we can no longer 

 define our sciences sharply, for each of them mingles with others on all 

 sides. Indeed the borderlands of any science, the points where it joins 

 with another, now make up the most interesting and promising fields 

 of research. Thus biology at one angle passes over into medicine, at 

 another into psychology, at another into sociology, one little corner 

 threatens to join with mathematics, and at nearly every turn it meets 

 with physics and chemistry. He would be a rash man who would try 

 to-day to present a rigid classification of the sciences, they being in 

 such a flux and flow of change ; indeed they are coming more and more 

 to constitute a unit. 



But each worker has to select a particular part of this web for his 

 study, for the reason that no man can undertake the whole ; it once was 

 that a strong mind could grasp the entire web, like as the mother spider 

 controls all lines of her snare, but now the web is so great and complex 

 that we single workers are like spiderlings upon it, each looking for his 

 own particular little gnat. We single laborers associate ourselves to- 

 gether according to our tastes, so as to favor interchange of thoughts, 

 thus forming societies, academies and the various other kinds of insti- 

 tutions, and the time has come when these different institutions should 

 cooperate and partition out the work to be done by each, so that there 

 may be as little waste and as little duplication as possible. For while 

 there may be as great difficulty in characterizing institutions as in de- 

 fining sciences, nevertheless mutual cooperation and division of labor 

 have come to be a necessity. 



Probably the oldest European association of naturalists was the 

 academy, a grouping of followers around a gifted thinker. In the days 

 of Greece such academies usually had no habitation, but the disciples 



