FERRIS: THE CONTRIBUTION OF NATURAL HISTORY TO HUMAN PROGRESS 81 



the great mother she was the founder of a dynasty. "With all her wealcnesses, 

 with all her deficiencies, with all her naivete, with all her actual ignorance of 

 many things, she was still great. She is now old and feeble and condemned to 

 withdraw from the main stream of activity, but the memory of her former great- 

 ness still remains. It is in her children and grandchildren — by direct descent 

 and as they have been hybridized with other lines — that we must seek to continue 

 this resume of her influence upon human progress. That lineage is beginning to 

 become involved, somewhat like the lines of descent of ancient royal families. 



Practical Aspects 



Of her children the one which most closely resembles its parent is ecology. 

 In fact, there are those who would say that ecology is merely natural history 

 under another name. "Were that entirely true, we would have something analo- 

 gous to the history of the gods and goddesses of mythology, many of whom 

 changed their names but not their attributes. But natural history lived and 

 flourished before the days of fingerprints and so a positive identification of 

 ecology with natural history cannot very well be established. AVe may make a 

 concession to the desires of ecologists who wish their subject to have the dignity 

 of an identity all its own. Let it rest. Let them have that dignity, but let them 

 not forget who was their maternal parent. 



Here, if amnvhere, the need for considering the organism as a whole, living 

 in a world of other organisms functioning as whole, still remains. In fact that 

 is what ecology is by definition, "the relation of an organism to its environment" 

 both living and physical. True, there is a branch of experimental ecology which 

 follows the experimental technique of bringing the subject of study into the 

 laboratory, dissociating it into its component parts and studying each of these 

 parts — temperature, moisture, pressure, light — as a thing by itself with the hope 

 eventually of combining these things in various degrees and then submitting the 

 combinations to similar study. This branch of experimental ecology is almost a 

 grandchild of natural history, for it is a hybrid involving elements from physics, 

 chemistry, and statistics. It displays something of that ''hybrid vigor" that is 

 often talked about, but as yet it is merely a strong and active child. Ecology in 

 general is still based upon the necessity for actually going out into the fields and 

 the woods and the waters and observing what is going on. The ecologist may at 

 times don his white jacket, retire to his laboratory and listen to the music of a 

 computing machine, but by and large, withal, he will be working up the data 

 that were initiallj' obtained while he wore a pair of field boots and was engaged 

 with the activities of plants and animals as they live in company with each 

 other, subjected to the wind and the rain, to heat and frost, and to the rolling 

 seasons. The ecologist of today may use registering thermometers and improved 

 rain gauges and barographs, improved methods of obtaining population counts 

 — and above all, improved means of transportation that prevent blisters on the 

 feet — but the objective and the outcome are in spirit very much the same as 

 they were years ago in the days of natural history. I go along with IMarston Bates 

 who remarks that "both labels apply to just about the same package of goods." 



Even if an ecologist might object to being called a naturalist, he would surely 

 not object to being included in a survey of what natural history has done for 

 human progress. There is here, however, actually a defining line to be drawn. 



