4 
212 foster: Integration tn Science. 
each of all those titles. If you asked such a one to do it, he 
would tell you that he did not understand the speech of most 
of them. To-day, as of old, the Royal Society at each of 
its ordinary meetings listens to communications on diverse 
branches of natural knowledge; but not, as of old, are all 
the Fellows present, ready to offer opinions on most of the 
topics dealt with. A stranger at any of the meetings will often . 
observe that, at the conclusion of the reading of a paper, or 
of the discussion sequent upon it, a number of those present 
will rise up and walk away. If he ask the reason, he will be 
told that these are physicists or chemists, and that the next 
paper is on a biological subject; or he may observe that while a 
paper is being read, some are paying no heed to it, but are 
reading or writing, or it may be slumbering or whispering. 
And if the stranger, fearing that such listlessness may be due 
a 
would probably receive as an answer, ‘I have not the 
slightest idea.’ 
One day, when a botanical author was expounding, with 
ne 
the help of a projection lantern, certain remarkable results 
r 
the room to hear a physical paper later on, leaning over to an 
eminent biologist in front of him, whispered, ‘Is it a disease?’ | 
Th 
wer has risen to a considerable height since the Royal 
Society was founded, and its Fellows are no REET able to 
ec 
or is it merely the case that the votaries of one science 
y 
speak a tongue sence to the followers of another science. 
Within what may be called ie and the selfsame science, the 
ee often fail to Demet one another. a 
nowledge of living things stands sharply apart from all a 
other hind of knowledge; it constitutes a distinct science, | 
which we sometimes speak of as ‘biology,’ though exception : - 
might be taken to the term, since Bios means ‘the course of 
life,’ ‘ the span of life,’ rather than that which is at the bottom — 
of the phenomena presented by living beings. This one science, — 
the knowledge of living things, may be at once divided into the 
knowledge of plants, which we call botany, and the knowledge 
im, which we call zoology, using both these terms in 
their wider sense. Time was when the same _ intellectual 
ie 209? vl pele Sree 
? 
