body. The lawyer who advises you in a copyright or patent cause knows
nothing about admiralty; and as they tell us a man who pleads his own case
has a fool for a client, so does the insurance lawyer who is retained to
foreclose a mortgage. In all prosperous city churches, the preacher who
attracts the crowd in the morning allows a 'prentice to preach to the
young folks in the evening; he does not make pastoral calls; and the
curate who reads the service at funerals is never called upon to perform a
marriage ceremony except in a case of charity. Likewise the teacher's
profession has its specialists: the man who teaches Greek well can not
write good English; the man who teaches composition is baffled and
perplexed by long division; and the teacher who delights in trigonometry
pooh-poohs a kindergartner.

Just where this evolutionary dividing and subdividing of social cells will
land the race no man can say; but that a specialist is a dangerous man, is
sure. He is a buzz-saw with which wise men never monkey. A surgeon who has
operated for appendicitis five times successfully is above all to be
avoided. I once knew a man with lung trouble who inadvertently strayed
into an oculist's and was looked over and sent away with an order on an
optician. And should you through error stray into the office of a nose and
throat specialist, and ask him to treat you for varicose veins, he would
probably do so by nasal douche.

Even now a specialist in theology will lead us, if he can, a merry
"ignis-fatuus" chase and land us in a morass. The only thing that saved
the priest in days agone was the fact that he had so many duties to
perform that he exercised all his mental muscles, and thus attained a
degree of all-roundness which is not possible to the specialist. Even then
there were not lacking men who found time to devote to specialties: Bishop
Georgius Ambrosius, for instance, who in the Fifteenth Century produced a