Kinds of Scientists 47 



Even as late as the French Revolution, Lavoisier laid the 

 basis of modern chemistry, in part because of his respon- 

 sibility for providing the French Army with gunpowder. 

 A little later Count Rumford was led to the formulation 

 of one of the major laws of thermodynamics by observing 

 the heat produced while he was boring cannon. 



Science as a vocation emerged in the nineteenth century 

 as universities slowly came to feel that natural science 

 might reasonably aspire to sit side by side with Latin, 

 Greek, and mathematics. The early unspecialized chairs 

 of natural philosophy shortly gave way to separate pro- 

 fessorships of physics, chemistry, and biology. By the end 

 of the century, physics had broken up into light, heat, me- 

 chanics, statics, and electricity; and chemistry into physi- 

 cal, organic, and inorganic. Biology already revealed a 

 cleavage between botany and zoology, but for the most 

 part it was dominated by the necessity of identifying and 

 classifying the infinite variety of species in which life 

 presents itself and aligning the results in terms of Darwin's 

 theory of evolution. In addition to the three major scien- 

 tific disciplines and their recognized subdivisions, the sub- 

 jects of astronomy and geology achieved independent status 

 fairly early. 



By and large, these differentiations, like the earlier dif- 

 ferentiation of the practical arts, occurred on the basis 

 of the tools required by the various disciplines. These in- 

 clude actual physical tools such as microscopes, precision 

 balances, timing apparatus, and colorimeters, and intel- 

 lectual tools of which perhaps mathematics was the most 

 important. Until approximately the last quarter of the nine- 

 teenth century, physics and astronomy were the only scien- 

 tific disciplines that really required a mastery of advanced 

 mathematics. But about this time, chemistry began to be 

 interested in the quantitative details of chemical reactions. 



