Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/98

88 each of which requires a lifetime of diligent study for its mastery, are serious obstacles in the investigation of a certain class of problems that can only be solved by contributions from the entire circle of the sciences.

Prof. Huxley has sounded a note of warning which should be heeded, especially by those who are engaged in conducting experiments for the advancement of agricultural science. In his retiring address as President of the Royal Society he says: "Of late years it has struck me with constantly increasing force that those who have toiled for the advancement of science are in a fair way of being overwhelmed by the realization of their own wishes. We are in the case of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of the Roman citadel to the Sabines, and was crushed under the weight of the reward bestowed upon her. It has become impossible for any man to keep pace with the progress of the whole of any important branch of science. If he were to attempt to do so his mental faculties would be crushed by the multitude of journals and voluminous monographs which a too fertile press casts upon him. This was not the case in my young days. A diligent reader might then keep fairly informed of all that was going on without demoralizing his faculties by the accumulation of unassimilated information. It looks as if the scientific, like other revolutions, meant to devour its own children; as if the growth of science tended to overwhelm its votaries; as if the man of science of the future were condemned to diminish into a narrower and narrower specialist as time goes on.

"I am happy to say that I do not think any such catastrophe a necessary consequence of the growth of science; but I do think it is a tendency to be feared, and an evil to be most carefully provided against. The man who works away at one corner of Nature, shutting his eyes to all the rest, diminishes his chances of seeing what is to be seen in that corner; for, as I need hardly remind my present hearers, that which the investigator perceives depends much more on that which lies behind his sense-organs than on the object in front of them.

"It appears to me that the only defense against this tendency to the degeneration of scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of culture without superficiality; and, on the other hand, depth and precision of knowledge without narrowness."

From the exceeding complexity of many of the problems in agricultural science, and the number of factors that require consideration in attempts to solve them, there is especial need of guarding against the dangers attending the exclusive prosecution of special lines of research, which are so forcibly stated by Prof. Huxley with reference to the general advancement of science.