i DIVISIONS OF SCIENCE n 



Artificial barriers are continually being raised to keep these 

 dividing lines in the direction in which they have once started. 

 Difficulties of readjustment arise not only from the mechanical 

 obstacles caused by the size and arrangements of the buildings 

 and facilities for the allocation of various kinds of collections, 

 but still more from the numerous personal interests which 

 grow up and wind their meshes around such institutions. 

 Professorships and curatorships of this or that division of 

 science are founded and endowed, and their holders are usually 

 tenacious either of encroachment upon or of any wide enlarge- 

 ment of the boundaries of the subject they have undertaken to 

 teach or to illustrate ; and in this way, more than any other, 

 passing phases of scientific knowledge have become crystallised 

 or fossilised in institutions where they might least have been 

 expected. I may instance many European universities and 

 great museums in which zoology and comparative anatomy are 

 still held to be distinct subjects taught by different professors, 

 and where, in consequence of the division of the collections 

 under their charge, the skin of an animal, illustrating its 

 zoology, and its skeleton and teeth, illustrating its anatomy, 

 must be looked for in different and perhaps remotely placed 

 buildings. 



For the perpetuation of the unfortunate separation of 

 palaeontology from biology, which is so clearly a survival of an 

 ancient condition of scientific culture, and for the maintenance 

 in its integrity of the heterogeneous compound of sciences 

 which we now call "geology," the faulty organisation of our 

 museums is in a great measure responsible. The more their 

 rearrangement can be made to overstep and break down the 

 abrupt line of demarcation which is still almost universally 

 drawn between beings which live now and those which have 

 lived in past times, so deeply rooted in the popular mind and 

 so hard to eradicate even from that of the scientific student, 

 the better it will be for the progress of sound biological know- 

 ledge. 



But it is not of the removal of such great anomalies and 

 inconsistencies, which, when they have once grown up, require 

 heroic methods to set them right, but rather of certain minor 

 defects in the organisation of almost all existing museums 



