Preface

The joint symposium recorded in this volume was an historic occasion. So, too, is its publication. They mark the decision of the Royal Society and the British Academy to work together in the many fields of learning where their interests overlap. It is commonplace today to speak of the two cultures, but the implication contains an oversimplification. The range of knowledge and research remains, as it always has done, continuous; it is divisible only because it has proved convenient at times to draw distinctions and by now some of the walls of the compartments of knowledge are wearing thin.