14 MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY 



date brought about an unfortunate separation between the Museum 

 and its staff and the zoological laboratory, also housed in the Mu- 

 seum building with its own distinguished group of teachers who 

 trained men in the modern technique of zoological research just 

 coming out of Germany. The rise of new aspects of Zoology such as 

 Cytology, Spermatogenesis and Organogenesis, the phenomena of 

 regeneration, and other topics fashionable, so to speak, at the time, 

 involved the use of the microtome and the microscope, and for one 

 reason or another a real schism arose, between those who studied the 

 animal as a whole and those who observed its parts. This was per- 

 haps natural enough, but the cleavage of interests became far too 

 wide and too deep. It must be remembered, moreover, that these 

 were the years when few, if any, foresaw the interdigitation of the 

 sciences as we see it today. Botany was either cryptogamic botany, 

 headed at Harvard by the great names of Farlow and Thaxter, or it 

 was systematic botany up at the Gray Herbarium, or it was physio- 

 logical botany at Dr. Goodale's laboratory in the Botanical Museum, 

 or it was dendrology, with a great leader, Charles Sargent, at the 

 Arnold Arboretum. No one would have dreamt twenty years ago 

 that there was no way of really subdividing botany in any funda- 

 mental way. The fact that all living creatures are subject to the same 

 natural laws and that they react to them in essentially similar ways, 

 and that the boundaries between the natural sciences really break 

 down, and that now without discussion or rancor it is universally 

 agreed that the curators in the museums teach if they want to, would 

 have been unthinkable a few years ago. Thus many hold positions in 

 the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Professors from the labora- 

 tory draw freely upon the museums for material of all sorts, even to 

 be cut up and destroyed; physiology finds a place in this company 

 and indeed leads the biological sciences into contact with the sciences 

 of chemistry and physics. Palaeontology is geology on one side and 

 historical zoology on the other. Anthropology is sociology on one 

 side and applied zoology on the other. So it goes. 



The laboratories to teach the natural sciences are now housed and 

 endowed as never before. Everyone is sincerely respectful of the in- 

 terests of all colleagues, hatchets are buried. We try to turn out only 

 the very best men, trained to maintain the standards which Professor 

 E. L. Mark and Professor George H. Parker maintained during their 



