Natural Science 
A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress 
SEPTEMBER 1899 




Moor SAND COMMENTS. 
Integration in Science. 
UNDER this title Sir Michael Foster delivered a stirrmg address to the 
Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union last December, and the address is now 
reprinted in full in The Naturalist tor 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—wart. sc.—vo.. xy. No. 91. 161 
