ORGANIZATION IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 49 



ORGANIZATION IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



By Professor WM. E. HITTER, 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 



PROGRESS in science leads to ever greater, more multifarious 

 minutiae of knowledge, and at the same time to ever clearer 

 revelation of the close and vital interdependence among the different 

 sciences. This characteristic of progress tends inevitably, for the 

 individual investigator, toward an unyielding paradox. On the one 

 hand, he is confronted by an ever increasing mass of detail, which 

 necessitates ever narrower specialization, while, on the other hand, he 

 is required to fit himself ever more thoroughly in an increasing num- 

 ber of sciences. See how it is faring with the zoologist, for example, 

 since his case happens to be one of painful concreteness to the present 

 writer. To enter this field by any of its numerous gateways with fair 

 prospects of being able to achieve much, one needs to be armed to the 

 teeth with weapons obtained in several other fields. In the first place, 

 he ought to be a physiologist among physiologists, with all that im- 

 plies of physics and chemistry. It is not enough that he be a zoolo- 

 gist with ' pretty fair training in physiology.' In the second place, he 

 ought to handle the mathematician's weapons just as the mathema- 

 tician himself handles them. Further, he can hardly get on without 

 being geologist, oceanographer, meteorologist, one or another, de- 

 pending on what aspect of zoology may be his chief interest. For the 

 strict individualist in research it looks as though some of the sciences 

 are in a way to progress themselves to a standstill before long. 

 What is to be done about it? 



It is becoming more and more obvious that in some of the sciences 

 continued progress, particularly in certain directions, calls for the 

 helping hand of workmen whose training and interests are not 

 primarily in the science directly concerned, but in neighboring sciences. 

 It is no longer possible for an investigator engaged upon some of the 

 problems of science, however broad and thorough be his training in 

 sciences other than his own, to use the tools borrowed from other 

 fields with real effectiveness in his own field. It is a question not 

 merely of preliminary training, but as well of point of view, to be 

 reached only by continuous and long continued living in a particular 

 realm of knowledge until a certain habit of mind peculiar to that 

 realm has been acquired. This is the sort of help that every science, 

 probably, certainly most sciences, must have from its neighbors. There 

 VOL. lxvii. — 4 



