882 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1095 



that have marked the last quarter of a cen- 

 tury none is more curious and interesting 

 than the marvelous increase in the number 

 of societies or groups of people associated 

 together for some special purpose other 

 than what is generally known as "busi- 

 ness." It seems to be an accepted theory 

 that if any thing is to be done or ought to 

 be done it is only necessary to form an 

 organization of those who think it ought to 

 be done, after which it is often assumed that 

 in some mysterious way the thing will do 

 itself. There is no part of the country 

 however remote or difficult of access that 

 has not been penetrated by and permeated 

 with this malady, and clubs, associations, 

 circles, etc., have been formed in bewilder- 

 ing numbers and perplexing confusion as 

 to origin and raison d'etre. Persons cyn- 

 ically inclined have attributed this to the 

 fact that each organization requires a presi- 

 dent and other officers and that the uni- 

 versal desire for place-holding is thus grati- 

 fied. Wliile there is doubtless more truth 

 in this explanation than we would care to 

 acknowledge, the phenomenon is largely the 

 outcome of the modern drift towards spe- 

 cialization in all spheres of human activity. 

 Indeed it is more than a drift ; it is a veri- 

 table flood-tide and many organizations of 

 recent creation are examples of specializa- 

 tion gone mad. 



Scientific men have not escaped this epi- 

 demic and during the past twenty years 

 their segregation into groups each of which 

 confines its activities in study and research 

 to a special and often a very narrow field, 

 has gone on with alarming rapidity. 

 Alarming because while there can be no 

 question that science has been and will con- 

 tinue to be greatly advanced by specializa- 

 tion it can not be denied that the man of 

 science has suffered and will continue to 

 suffer from the same cause. Burrowing in 

 a trench, necessary as that operation often 



is, if persisted in to the exclusion of other 

 occupations, deprives the burrower of that 

 breadth of view and general acquaintance 

 with the topography of the surrounding 

 country which is necessary to the under- 

 standing, direction or control of larger 

 operations. It will be admitted that up to 

 the present time the epoch-making general- 

 izations in science have originated with 

 men, who, though profound students of 

 some great subdivision of human knowl- 

 edge, have not been given to acute speciali- 

 zation. Although we may not expect an- 

 other Bacon to rise and declare, "I have 

 taken all knowledge to be my province," 

 it is safe to predict that if we are to have in 

 the future discoveries of a magnitude com- 

 parable with that of the Coperniean theory 

 of the universe, the law of gravitation, the 

 doctrine of evolution or the conservation of 

 energy, they will come from men whose 

 learning is comprehensive rather than in- 

 tensive. Indeed the same rule must hold in 

 more restricted fields of research. One who 

 devotes himself exclusively to the study of 

 "the abdominal parasites of the white ant" 

 is not likely to evolve from it a new and 

 important biological principle; nor is it 

 probable that an intensive study of conju- 

 gate systems of space curves or years de- 

 voted to a revision of the atomic weights of 

 the rare metals would carry one far on the 

 way towards an explanation of the nature 

 and cause of gravitational attraction. I 

 would much regret to be understood as dep- 

 recating or disparaging specialization in 

 science. It is of the highest importance 

 even in its narrowest phase for through it 

 the phenomena of nature are revealed. 

 But finding how one phenomenon is related 

 to another; the logical grouping of results 

 of observation and experiment and the der- 

 ivation therefrom of general principles and 

 laws will always call for intellectual powers 

 of a distinctly higher order. 



