Natural Science T~\ 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress ' 



September 1899 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



Integration in Science. 



Under this title Sir Michael Foster delivered a stirring address to the 

 Yorkshire Naturalists' Union last December, and the address is now 

 reprinted in full in The Naturalist for July. Its object is to 

 consider how Naturalists' Societies may be used to check the tendency 

 of biological science to disintegrate into separate and distinct sciences, 

 and to show how far that disintegration has already proceeded, and how 

 great the need for integration. Sir Michael compares the Temple of 

 Science to that earlier erection which men are said to have built on 

 the plain of Shinar. Both buildings seem to have the same con- 

 sequences, in that, as they rise, the builders cease to understand one 

 another's tongues. What then shall the modern workmen do to 

 prevent the fate of their prototypes becoming their fate also ? Has 

 not the confusion of tongues already proceeded so far that the work- 

 men are scattered and the building delayed ? As Sir Michael points 

 out, not only have physicist and chemist learnt to speak a language 

 unintelligible to botanist and zoologist, but worse still, the erstwhile 

 zoologists are split into anatomists, physiologists, and systematists, each 

 of whom uses a tongue foreign to his brother. The extension of the 

 examination system has aggravated the evil, until to many a " zoologist " 

 the animal form is seen only through " the long vista of a lengthy 

 ribbon of gorgeously stained microtome-cut sections of exquisite 

 thinness." That much of this is the necessary consequence of the 

 division of labour and the progress of knowledge cannot be denied, 

 nor can we forget that the " outcome of the deepest, most far-reaching 

 biologic inquiry has been the rehabilitation of the naturalist of old," 

 yet the reality and extent of the evil can hardly be overestimated. 

 Sir Michael is of opinion that there is little hope of remedying it by 

 an appeal to the schools, but he thinks that it is the special function 

 of Naturalists' Societies to assist in the process of integration, and to 

 teach the academic neophytes something of the meaning of the word 

 naturalist. The moral is so excellent that it seems worthy of the 

 attention of societies other than that to which it was addressed. 



11 NAT. SC. VOL. XV. NO. 91. l6l 



