SPECIALIZATION IN SCIENCE. 29 



training, to grope in as complete a cliildish ignorance of natural things 

 as tlie narrowest specialists in the service. That we of the present day 

 in Germany have made so little advance in obtaining for science its 

 proper place in education is certainly not least due to the reserve which 

 our learned men usually observe with reference to questions of public 

 life, and especially to their voluntary burial of themselves in special 

 fields. 



It is persistent application to special work that naturally forces the 

 student so far away from all contact with things without, and which, 

 while it makes him a monarch on his own little field, frequently also 

 makes his circuit too narrow and himself too self-important. It is not 

 my purpose to condemn the specializing of science, and occupation 

 with a single branch, in themselves. The more a man studies one 

 thing, the more he sees in it ; and the investigator who has engaged 

 himself assiduously with one object sees in it a whole world, in the 

 view of which all other things pass from notice. It is a joy to work 

 in this way on one's own field, and it is also necessary for every one to 

 undergo rigorous schooling in such exercises, especially previous to 

 appearing before the world with any general treatise. Tendencies 

 like that of contemporary science toward specializing are naturally 

 inevitable. The time will come again in which the pressure will in 

 'ike manner impel students, sifting out the now concluded results of 

 science, to work them up into a whole. 



It is, however, not doubtful that the majority of students, so far 

 at least as they are public teachers, to-day go too far in their special- 

 izing. Whoever uninterruptedly looks upon a single thing year after 

 year learns no more of the w^hole. Not alone that the view over 

 science is wholly lost to him, but even in his own branch is such a man 

 at last no longer able to be at home. It is almost the fashion to-day, 

 as among the zoologists and botanists, for example, no longer to make 

 themselves acquainted with entire animals and plants. At all events, 

 many zoologists of the day — and the same is the case with the botan- 

 ists in their sphere — have hardly ever accurately examined an animal 

 as a w^hole ; but they have with the microtome dissected ever so many 

 animals of a group into fine slits, have pulled them to pieces wath the 

 needle under the microscope, and have described their observations in 

 monographs. Every one who has done this kind of work in any con- 

 siderable degree, as has the present writer, must know that while it is 

 going on there is not much time left for the learning of other things. 

 I will not go too deeply into the merits of the work in itself — it must 

 be done. But I hold that in the immediate present it has become too 

 exclusively predominant. 



Hand-in-hand with the exaggeration of special work goes the grow- 

 ing inability to write understandingly to the general public. The 

 German student appears only too often to think that he must present 

 his subject in the most difficult i)hraseology, excessively interlarded 



