Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/631

Rh they would be no better off if they did; but, for human beings, it is never doubted that specialization is a very profitable thing.

It manifests itself in two ways: 1. By the division and subdivision of existing specialties. 2. By the creation of new ones. The first is called division of labor, the second diversification of industry. It will be interesting to consider these in their order.

The practice of medicine offers us, in some respects, a good object-lesson. We talk most about specialties in medicine, for the very reason that it was one of the last occupations to be sub-specialized. Even now we have in the country, and especially in new countries, the general practitioner who attends to all the ills that flesh is heir to. He pulls teeth, amputates limbs, "doctors" the eyes and ears, and does, or tries to do, everything that all the medical specialists of a great city do. And yet his profession was itself, until within a few generations, an undivided and apparently indivisible specialty. The sub-specialties into which it has been divided may, in future, be still further divided and subdivided.

It would be interesting, if it were possible, to take some one great industry or profession, and trace out the pedigree of the specialties into which it has been divided. For an experiment in that direction, we might take the newspaper. It is now a very minutely subdivided specialty. Not only each political party, each religious denomination, each open and secret organization, but each line of business of any considerable importance, has its daily, weekly, or monthly journals devoted to its interests. And the number and variety of specialty journals are daily increasing. A list of their names would suffice for a chapter on industrial specialization. With the dates of their founding it would be a chart of the growth of the process. We should see here a process which, by reminding us of the division of the fertilized fowl's egg into feathers, bones, muscle, nerves, blood, skin, fat, etc., connects the science of political economy with all the other biological sciences.

But not only is journalism as a whole thus specialized; the process is going on within each newspaper-office. The work is more and more divided, as the journal grows in circulation, size, and variety of contents. I shall attempt a diagram, on the plan of a royal pedigree, and it will be all the more instructive if it is not carried out to its actual limits, as exemplified in a metropolitan newspaper. Start with the original "journalist," who may yet be found in some Western county capitals, writing all his local items and general editorials, setting all his type, doing his own press-work, mailing or carrying his papers, soliciting subscriptions and advertisements, keeping and collecting his accounts in fact, publishing the leading county paper, and "no thanks to anybody." He is the life-size presentment of "independence." He is still a specialist, but we know by the experience of others, even if we could not see at a glance, that his specialty is capable of