Within the past few years universities have begun to undertake seriously the development of professional training for business. The result has been that through organized research and through investigations by individual teachers and students, the universities are gathering up the threads of different tendencies toward scientific business and are themselves contributing important scientific results. Out of all this there is emerging a body of principles and of tested practice which constitutes an appropriate subject-matter for a professional course of study, and points the way to still further research. One of the earliest results of an approach to business in an attitude of scientific research, is the discovery that there are certain fundamental principles which are alike for all lines of business, however diverse the subject-matter to which analysis is applied. Substituting the principle of likeness for diversity as the starting-point of business analysis, has far-reaching consequences not only for education and research but for management as well. First among these consequences is the fact that search for elements of likeness leads at once to replacing the trade or industry with the function as the significant unit both of research and organization. If we start our study of business by separating manufacturing, railroading, merchandising, banking, and the rest, with a large number of more or less logical subdivisions in each field, and then try to work out a body of principles applicable to each subdivision, we soon run into endless combinations and lose all sense of unity in business as a whole. As soon, however, as we approach business from the standpoint of accounting, sales management, employment, executive control, and when we find that lessons in statistics, advertising, moving materials, or executive management, learned in connection with a factory, can be carried over with but slight adaptation to the management of a store, we at once get a manageable body of material on which to work. Recognition of the principle of likeness and of its corollary, analysis by function rather than by trade, marks perhaps the greatest single step yet taken in the development of scientific business. The principle, however, has its dangers. Analysis by function implies functional specialization in research and a similar tendency in business practice. Without specialization there can be no adequate analysis of any large and complex body of facts. With too intense specialization there is always danger that the assembling and digesting of facts, and especially the conclusions drawn from them, will reflect some peculiar slant of an individual or of a particular specialty.