PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 93 



last quarter of a century have studied its rudiments and feel 

 competent to employ its methods and its language, and to form 

 judgments on the merits of current work. 



In the meantime the professional men of science, the scholars, 

 and the investigators seem to me to be strangely indifferent to the 

 questions as to how the public at large is to be made familiar 

 with the results of their labors. It may be that the tendency to 

 specialization is destined to deprive the sciences of their former 

 hold upon popular interest, and that the study of zoology, bot- 

 any and geology, mineralogy and chemistry will become so 

 technical that each will require the exclusive attention of its 

 votaries for a period of years. It may be that we are to have no 

 more zoologists such as Agassiz and Baird, no more botanists 

 such as Gray, and that the place which such men filled in the 

 community will be supplied by combinations of a number of 

 specialists, each of whom knows, with more minuteness, limited 

 portions of the subjects grasped bodily by the masters of the last 

 generation. It may be that the use of the word naturalist is to 

 became an anachronism, and that we are all destined to become, 

 generically biologists, and, specifically, morphologists, histologists, 

 embryologists, physiologists, or, it may be, cetologists, chirop- 

 terologists, oologists, carcinologists, ophiologists, helmintholo- 

 gists, actinologists, coleopterists, caricoologists, mycologists, 

 muscologists, bacteriologists, diatomologists, paleo-botanists, crys- 

 tallographers, petrologists, and the like. 



I can but believe, however, that it is the duty of every sci- 

 entific scholar, however minute his specialty, to resist in himself, 

 and in the professional circles which surround him, the tendency 

 toward narrowing technicality in thought and sympathy, and 

 above all in the education of non-professional students. 



I cannot resist the feeling that American men of science are 

 in a large degree responsible if their fellow-citizens are not 

 fully awake to the claims of scientific endeavor in their midst. 



