Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/765

Rh scientific inquiry and philosophical speculation. So all through the development of knowledge in Europe, down to the time of Newton, when the use of the term "natural philosophy" for physical science implies an indefinite distinction between the two. But now the distinction has become tolerably definite—quite definite in Germany and in large measure definite here. The philosopher does not enter upon scientific investigations and often knows little about scientific truths; while, conversely, the man of science, of whatever class, is little given to philosophical speculation, and is commonly uninformed about the philosophical conclusions held by this or that school. How distinct the-two classes have become is implied by the contempt not unfrequently expressed by each for the other.

Simultaneously there has progressed a separation within the body of scientific men into those who respectively deal with the inorganic and the organic. Nowadays, men who occupy themselves with mathematical, physical and chemical investigations are generally ignorant of biology; while men who spend their lives in studying the phenomena of life, under one or other of its aspects, are often without interest in the truths constituting the exact sciences. Between animate and inanimate things there is a marked contrast, and there has come to be a marked division between the students of the two groups.

Yet a further transformation of the same nature has been going on. Within each-of these groups differentiations and subdifferentiations have been taking place. The biologists have divided themselves primarily into those who study plant-life and those who study animal-life—the phytologists (commonly called botanists) and the zoölogists. In each of these great divisions there have been established large sub-divisions: in the one those who devote themselves to the classification of species, those who treat of plant-morphology, those who treat of plant-physiology; and in the other the classifiers, the comparative anatomists, the animal-physiologists. More restricted specializations have arisen. Among botanists there are some who study almost exclusively this or that order; among physiologists, some who commonly take one class of function for their province, and among zoölogists there are first of all the divisions into those who are professed entomologists, ornithologists, ichthyologists, etc., and again within each of these are smaller groups, as among the entomologists, those who study more especially the coleoptera, the lepidoptera, the hymenoptera, etc.

Respecting these major and minor differentiations it has only further to be remarked that though the prosecution of science as a whole is not called a profession (the whole being too extensive and heterogeneous), yet the prosecution of this or that part of it