320 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



That the British Association is broken up into sections, 

 designated by letters of the alphabet, from A to K, is due to the 

 enormous extension of modern science, which makes division of 

 labour a matter not of choice but of necessity. Each section is 

 an association in itself. Each is fully, and sometimes more than 

 fully, occupied with its committees and reports, and papers and 

 discussions and recommendations. Our own energetic honorary 

 secretary, Dr. Abbott, has printed on the back of your tickets a 

 list of thirteen departments of scientific investigation in which he 

 invites you to take an active part for the benefit of our Union and 

 Congress. He does not pretend that the list is exhaustive, and 

 in fact he does not mention either Bryology or Embryology or 

 Bryozoology ; he has omitted Mycology and Malacology and Car- 

 cinology ; he has steered clear of Morphology and Physiology and 

 Seismology, of Zoogeography and Phytogeography and Crystallo- 

 graphy ; he says nothing about plankton or nekton or benthos, 

 and he saves his credit, as I must do mine, by alluding to all the 

 rest as " allied subjects." This at least is patent, that of subjects 

 there is no dearth, but no one can any longer hope to be a 

 specialist in all of them or in many. To know everything about 

 something or something about everything is becoming increasingly 

 difficult. Every one recognises the intellectual danger of extreme 

 specializing, of working too exclusively in a single groove, but 

 the modern hermit no longer sighs for — 



" The hairy gown and mossy cell, 

 Where [he] may sit and rightly spell 

 Of every star that heaven doth shew 

 And every herb that sips the dew." 



Thoroughgoing astronomy by night and thoroughgoing botany 

 by day are no longer so readily combined as they may have been 

 in Milton's time. The force of circumstances is making it ever 

 less and less easy to induce the man who is investigating the 

 nroperties of helium or studying the corona of the sun to sym- 

 pathise with the other man who is carrying on researches into 

 the genealogy of a centipede or the domestic economy of a 

 cockroach. 



Nevertheless, through the marvellous unity of Nature — that 

 unrivalled argument for the oneness of a Divine Author of it — 



