Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/632

614 sub-specialization. Starting from him as the original "journalist," we find his work divided in a neighboring city office in a manner which may be diagrammed thus:

And this is only the beginning. If we stepped into a metropolitan newspaper establishment, we should find the work still much further divided and subdivided. A whole article would be required to describe it briefly. And the same would be true of many other industries once considered such narrow specialties that, with some reason, they were believed to have a narrowing effect on the minds of those who pursued them.

The advantages thus gained have been dwelt upon by all economists since Adam Smith. They correspond quite closely to those secured by the specializations which Nature produces all around us in the different organs and tissues of plants and animals. A good deal of tedious hair-splitting would be required to define all of them, but they may be roughly divided as follows:

I. Those that appear immediately, as the ability to form combinations of effort not otherwise possible, or not without greater waste of time or greater expense for tools. The different parts in a play must be taken by different persons. This is made necessary by the very nature of the work. In other cases the same person might attend to many different tasks, but he would lose time in passing from one to another; and he might require a greater variety of tools.

II. Those that come a little later, like the acquired skill of the individual specialist, and perish with him. Stradivarius devoted his energies to the specialty of making violins. By doing so he gave us the best violins ever made. The fact that they have never since been equaled shows that his slowly-acquired skill died with him.