INTEGRATION IN SCIENCE 
a (Presidential Address to the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union, delivered 
14th December 1898). 
SIR MICHAEL FOSTER, K.C.B., M.A., Etc., 
Secretary of the Royal Society, Professor of Physiology in the University of Lambctice, 
President of the Yorkshire Naturatists’ Union for 1898. 
WE are told that when the world was young and ‘the will 
¢ 
n 
bricks, burning them thoroughly, and with these strove to build 
there a city and a tower whose top might reach unto heaven. 
We are also told that as they wrought, raising their handiwork 
higher and higher, their language was confounded, so that they © 
might not understand one another’s speech, and hence could not 
carry out their work. They left off to build the city. 
During the long years which have passed away since those 
early days, generations of men, still journeying from the East, 
have been making bricks of another kind, burning them more 
or less thoroughly, and with them have gone on building a city 
which they call the city of Natural Knowledge, have gone on 
raising higher and still higher a tower which they call the tower 
of Science. During these. latter times, during the last two or 
three centuries, especially during this last century, the tower has 
risen rapidly, storey has been added to storey; and, indeed, some 
have thought, or have seemed to think, that its top was reach- 
ing unto heaven. But as the tower has been rising higher and 
higher, especially as the newer stories have been a-building, 
something of the fate of the old tower of Babel has fallen on the 
builders ; their language is showing signs of being confounded ; 
ear by year they are becoming less and less able to under- 
Stand each other’s speech. The old example of the plain of 
Shinar bids every thoughtful man ask himself the question, is 
not this confusion of languages hindering and spoiling the work, 
even if it will not, as it did of old, stop it altogether ?. Cannot 
something be done to check this development of tongues, or at 
least to provide adequate interpreters 
Let me make use of the opportunity you have to-day offered 
me, by attempting to illustrate the reality of the danger which 
threatens us, and possibly to suggest some means to avoid or 
at least lessen at 
doh Oe 
