22 MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY. 



in turn has its limits in our power to improve the 

 methods of investigation. The tendency, then, is regu- 

 lated by the necessities and advantages of the investi- 

 gator ; and although we may not be able to fix definite 

 limits to its growth, we are not the less certain that it 

 has such limits, and that there is no danger either of a 

 wholesale reaction or of our ever specializing to pieces. 

 As in the organic and social worlds, so in the scientific, 

 there are centripetal forces that keep pace with the 

 centrifugal ones ; and the danger of any science flying 

 into disconnected atoms is about as dreamy and remote 

 as the dissolution of the earth itself. 



The movement in the direction of separation is gen- 

 eral and, as it now seems to us, rapid. Cuvier thought 

 that division of labor characterized the natural science 

 of his day ; but the movement was then in its earliest 

 infancy. If you wish to know how extensive it has now 

 become, you should look at the ponderous volumes of 

 the *' Zoological Record" or the ''Naples Jahresbericht." 

 When you reflect that it requires such massive volumes 

 to record the bare titles and a brief abstract of the work 

 of a single year, you realize how impossible it is for any 

 one naturalist to cover the whole ground, or even to 

 read the hundredth part of what his collaborators have 

 to report. 



Naturalists then are no longer cosmogonists, but 

 specialists. This being the fact, what is to be done 

 in view of it.-* Where lies the remedy for every dan- 

 ger of narrowness that may lurk in the tendency to 

 specialize ? How is the range of vision to be kept 

 free and broad while focussing attention on some one 

 point of the field .-* If one specialty absorbs our whole 



