Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/766

748 has come to be thus distinguished. We have "professors" of various divisions and sub-divisions of it; and this implies that the bread-winning pursuit of science, irrespective of the particular kind, must be regarded as a profession.

The combinations of like units which have accompanied these separations of unlike units, are equally conspicuous. Those occupied in science as a whole, as well as those occupied in particular divisions of science, have everywhere tended to segregate themselves and consolidate.

On the, Continent each nation has a scientific academy or equivalent body, and in some cases several such. In our own country we have, similarly, a fixed general union among scientific men—the Royal Society; in addition to which we have a nomadic general union—the British Association.

Then beyond these largest corporations including all kinds of scientific men, we have various smaller corporations, each comprised of those devoted to a particular branch or sub-branch of science—a Mathematical Society, a Physical Society, a Chemical Society, an Astronomical Society, a Geological Society, a Physiological Society; and others occupied with sub-divisions of Biology—Botany, Zoölogy, Anthropology, and Entomology: all of them being children of the Royal Society and in some measure aids to it. Nor let us forget that besides these metropolitan societies there are scattered throughout the kingdom local societies, devoted to science in general or to some division of science.

This is not all. Integration, general and special, of the scientific world is made closer, and the co-operation of all parts aided, by continuous publications: weekly and monthly and quarterly journals which are general in their scope, and others of like periodicities which are special in their scope. Thus minor aggregates held in connection as parts of a great aggregate have their activities furthered by literary inter-communication; and as elsewhere implied (see Essays, vol. i, "The Genesis of Science"), the vast organism thus constituted has acquired a power of digesting and assimilating the various classes of phenomena which no one part of it alone could effectually deal with.

the style of house-building may be affected by the character of the neighborhood is illustrated by the observation of Captain H. Bowen, that while traveling in Turkistan, after crossing the Kotli-i Kandahar Pass, from the Tung River into the valley of the Wachi River, the houses bore evidence of the fear in which the inhabitants live of their neighbors on the south, the Kunjuts. Instead of scattered farmhouses, the traveler invariably found several houses joined together and presenting a fortlike appearance.