[49] 



The extraordinary development of mod- 

 ern science may be her undoing. Special- 

 ism, now a necessity, has fragmented the 

 specialities themselves in a way that makes 

 the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all 

 sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae. 

 Everywhere men are in small coteries in- 

 tensely absorbed in subjects of deep inter- 

 est, but of very limited scope. Chemistry, 

 a century ago an appanage of the Chair of 

 Medicine or even of Divinity, has now a 

 dozen departments, each with its laboratory 

 and literature, sometimes its own society. 

 Applying themselves early to research, 

 young men get into backwaters far from 

 the main stream. They quickly lose the 

 sense of proportion, become hypercritical, 

 and the smaller the field, the greater the 

 tendency to megalocephaly. The study for 

 fourteen years of the variations in the colour- 

 scheme of the thirteen hundred species of 

 tiger-beetles scattered over the earth may 



