Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/348

320 That the British Association is broken up into sections, designated by letters of the alphabet, from A to K, is due to the enormous extension of modern science, which makes division of labour a matter not of choice but of necessity. Each section is an association in itself. Each is fully, and sometimes more than fully, occupied with its committees and reports, and papers and discussions and recommendations. Our own energetic honorary secretary, Dr. Abbott, has printed on the back of your tickets a list of thirteen departments of scientific investigation in which he invites you to take an active part for the benefit of our Union and Congress. He does not pretend that the list is exhaustive, and in fact he does not mention either Bryology or Embryology or Bryozoology; he has omitted Mycology and Malacology and Carcinology; he has steered clear of Morphology and Physiology and Seismology, of Zoogeography and Phytogeography and Crystallography; he says nothing about plankton or nekton or benthos, and he saves his credit, as I must do mine, by alluding to all the rest as "allied subjects." This at least is patent, that of subjects there is no dearth, but no one can any longer hope to be a specialist in all of them or in many. To know everything about something or something about everything is becoming increasingly difficult. Every one recognises the intellectual danger of extreme specializing, of working too exclusively in a single groove, but the modern hermit no longer sighs for—

Thoroughgoing astronomy by night and thoroughgoing botany by day are no longer so readily combined as they may have been in Milton's time. The force of circumstances is making it ever less and less easy to induce the man who is investigating the properties of helium or studying the corona of the sun to sympathise with the other man who is carrying on researches into the genealogy of a centipede or the domestic economy of a cockroach.

Nevertheless, through the marvellous unity of Nature—that unrivalled argument for the oneness of a Divine Author of it—there