“Men in the business of knowing things have taken a tip from the
plumbers, carpenters and plasterers,” announced Friar McCollister, one
of the University of Chicago literati. “No longer is it possible to go
to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk
and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to
the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’ in Sanscrit, and get an answer.
The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you
ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: ‘That is not in my
department.’ I found this out the other day when I tried to get some
information on the discovery of a human skull three million years old.
“First, I went to the information office of the University. There I
encountered a sprightly young man who turned out to be a professor of
sociology. But he didn’t know anything about men three million years old.
He only studied living men, he said. ‘Better go over to Haskell Museum,’
he told me. ‘They have some skulls and mummies over there.’
“I ran up three flights of stairs and into a dusty old room where I saw
a Dr. Edgerton. He was copying strange characters out of a book yellow
with age. When I put my question he replied that the only ancients he
knew were Egyptian mummies. He said I should see an anthropologist. Back
to the information office to see where they kept the anthropologists.
“They sent me up to Walker Museum, where a bland young man said, ‘Freddie
Starr is not in, but you don’t want an anthropologist, anyway. You want
to see an ethnologist.’
“When I found one, after dogging him all over the campus, he told me that
the matter really belonged in the department of geology. From there they
sent me to see the department of paleontology. At last I located it in
a cubby-hole of a museum which I didn’t even know was there, although I
have been on the campus three years.
“‘But, my dear sir,’ replied the head of the department to my
question, ‘that is not in my department. What you want is a vertebrate
paleontologist, and I am only a plain paleontologist. At present we have
no vertebrate paleontologist at the University. The last one died a few
years ago.’
“Well, I gave up my search,” said Mr. McCollister. “This age of
specialization is too much for me.”