58 SPECIALIZATION IN NATURAL SCIENCE. 



these separated parts, and when he has got them all to- 

 gether, can try their various combinations, until he has 

 found to which one a lock will yield, and a new door will 

 fly open. Now it is a characteristic element of this 

 search, that you can never know beforehand in what mi- 

 nute, obscure, uninteresting little fact of nature you may 

 find the missing link in one of these combination-keys. 

 This is the fundamental principle which makes honora- 

 ble and worthy of the greatest mind, studies of a host of 

 trivial facts which to the world at large are chaff and 

 straw. The ignorant farmer laughs at the trifling of the 

 geologist who laboriously chisels out a poor little shell 

 from a rock. Yet that shell will whisper to the scientist 

 the history of the birth-throes of a continent, and may 

 point to where its coal-fields lie. Fraunhofer re-discovers 

 and records the shadowy transverse lines in the spectrum 

 which Wollaston had noticed and then forgotten. The 

 great money-kings of his day who would have scorned to 

 waste time on such trifles are now mostly in oblivion ; 

 but Fraunhofer' s name will honorably travel down the 

 ages with those very lines whose brilliant service to sci- 

 ence, and even to the arts to-day, is beyond computation 

 in gold. 



Few labors of the modern specialist have been more 

 trying than the studies in embryology, by which the life- 

 histories of many animals have been traced from the egg- 

 to maturity. But by no process in zoological study has 

 ever so rich a harvest of results been reached before. 

 They have re-arranged the classification and modified the 

 existing beliefs concerning almost every group of living 

 subjects. 



I am happy to quote an instance of the ' immediate 



present, where this very study of embryology, though 



apparently impracticable to the last degree, is achieving 



results destined, at no distant day, to bring millions in 



wealth to one of our prominent industries. 



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