BIOLOGY AMONG THE SCIENCES 1143 



with it, have practically ended, and that the further multiplication 

 of specialisms alone awaits us. We may smile at the extreme 

 specialist of old when he jubilantly writes, as did Basil Valentine, 

 in his "Triumphant Chariot of Antimony" — that "the shortness of 

 life maketh it impossible fully to learn antimony, wherein every 

 day something of new is discovered". But if to-day we substitute 

 radium for antimony, we see his saying now incomparably sur- 

 passed among the manifold and magnificent labours of radiologists 

 over the world, in their ever-increasing numbers, their fresh results, 

 and with deep-reaching consequences. Yet there is also even deeper 

 truth in the saying of Leibnitz — one of the widest-ranging thinkers 

 on record, as from mathematics to history, to philosophy, and even 

 to policy of wisest foresight — when he says — "the more a science 

 advances, the more it concentrates into little books". For after all, 

 though our observation of the universe is ever being immeasurably 

 widened, as from greatest telescope to ultra-microscope, our human 

 eye has no real difficulty in using either, and both. And so again for 

 the geographer, whose everyday observation copes alike with the 

 ever-advancing mapping of the great globe, with the charting and 

 sounding of its oceans, and with the labyrinthic planning of the 

 cities as well as that of their minutest domestic details. So, too, 

 though even of old it could be said that "the world cannot contain 

 the books that are written", the bibliographer is increasingly 

 organising our command of these to-day. The like range and grasp 

 is similarly opening in every field of thought before us; in short, a 

 synthetic age is plainly beginning. If so, each University, at its 

 fuUest and best — besides continuing its ever-needed policy of full 

 and free encouragement of research in aU directions, and with 

 whatever institutes are thus found to be required — must and will 

 also complement and co-ordinate its labyrinths of departments by 

 those of sub-syntheses for each group of specialisms; and next by 

 that of synthesis among these, thus truly taking aU knowledge for 

 its province, and not simply by its departments; and next even for 

 applications, towards synergy as well. Nor is this a mere sanguine 

 prediction. Such university plannings already exist, and in East 

 and West alike ; in the East — strange as it may seem — most definitely 

 of all as yet for the Moslem, with his deepest realisation of unity, 

 his fullest sense of democracy as weU. Yet the Western mind is of 

 course, needed also. And this not merely by reason of its as yet 

 incomparably more developed sciences, its more frequent training of 

 highest powers towards varied masteries. 



And in the West, woman is also coming into her own. As yet no 

 doubt mostly but in minor ways, since within old masculine acade- 

 mics and politics, still unadapted to her, stiU less by her. But the 

 biologist and psychologist, who increasingly discern how the life- 

 bearing and life-tending instincts and aptitudes of her sex are 



