AIM, CONTENT, AND POINT OF VIEW 19 



ST. HILAIRE, I. GEOFFBAT. 



1859. Histoire Generate des Regnes Organiques, Vol. II. 

 Not seen by writer. Dr. W. M. Wheeler, of Harvard 

 University, has kindly sent me the following note 

 from p. 285. ' 'It is to ethology therefore that the 

 fourth part of this work is devoted, to which belongs 

 the study of the relations of organisms within the 

 family and the society in the aggregate and in the 

 community.' In a volume of the same work, page 

 xx, St. Hilaire gives his program and speaks of the 

 general facts belonging to ethological laws. These are 

 defined as ' relating to the instincts, habits and more 

 generally to the external vital manifestations of or- 

 ganisms.' ' About the preceding Dr. Wheeler re- 

 marks : " You see this covers precisely the field which 

 was a few years later called 'ecology' by Haeckel. 

 Apparently the part of the work in which St. Hilaire 

 wished to give a detailed account of the ethological 

 phenomena of animals was not published. Only 

 three volumes of the work exist. He died November 

 10, 1861, without having completed the work." 

 Thus ethology has priority over ecology, but to my 

 mind this fact carries no special weight, particularly 

 since the word has become current in botany. To 

 use a different name for the same subject or process 

 in botany and zoology is as undesirable as to use a 

 different term for heredity in plants and in animals. 



LANKESTER, E. R. 



1889. Article "Zoology." Ency. Britannica, 9th ed. Amer. 



Reprint. Vol. XXIV, pp. 842, 856. 

 Lankester defines " Bionomics. The lore of the farmer, 

 gardener, sportsman, fancier, and field naturalist, 

 including thremmatology, or the science of breeding, 

 and the allied teleology, or science of organic adap- 

 tations : exemplified by the patriarch Jacob, the poet 

 Vergil, Sprengel, Kir by and Spence, Wallace, and 



