GOOD: PLANT GEOGRAPHY 753 



lished as a separate subject, but it is not unreasonable to think of Schimper's 

 Pflanzen-Geog raphie as belonging to the older dispensation and of Warming's 

 Plant esamf unci as belonging to the new, though in fact this is the reverse of 

 their actual dates of appearance. Apart from these two it was perhaps the work 

 of Flahault, of Montpellier, rather than that of any other man that gave the 

 initial impulse to ecology, which at first consisted largely of the mapping of 

 vegetation, such as he had been doing in France for some years. At all events 

 it was one of his pupils, Robert Smith, who introduced his methods into Britain. 

 But shortly after this Smith unfortunately died and, although his work was 

 carried on by his brother and others, it later met with practical difficulties. 

 Attention then passed, largely under the leadership of Tansley, happily still 

 with us, rather to the analysis of vegetation and the study of the different kinds 

 of plant communities, work in which a very definite stage was reached by the 

 publication in 1911 of Tansley 's Types: of British Vegetation. 



As might be assumed, a similar and indeed even greater development had 

 been taking place synchronously on the continent of Europe, in which indeed 

 so many names claim recognition that it is almost invidious to make a selection. 

 Among the significant works the following stand out clearly: Schroter's publica- 

 tion (with Frith) of Die Moore der Schiveiz (1904), which was a landmark; 

 Raunkiar's classic study of growth form (1907) ; and Riibel's later work, Pflanzen- 

 geselhchaften der Erde (1930), which is a remarkable study of European plant 

 communities. According to Tansley (1911) Schroter also deserves mention as 

 the first to distinguish between ''synecology," or the study of plant communities 

 in relation to their habitats, and "autecology," or the study of the ecology of 

 single species. 



In America the growth of the new subject went hand in hand with that in 

 the Old World, as instanced by Hitchcock's OecoJogical Plant Geography of 

 Kansas (1898) and by the Phytogeography of Nebraska by Pounds and Clements 

 (1900), but with a rather greater emphasis on the developmental aspects. By 

 1899 Cowles had begun to publish on the subject of plant succession, the great 

 later expansion of which under the leadership of Clements (1916) is one of the 

 notable features of American plant ecology. It is interesting to note this differ- 

 ence of emphasis for it is surely indicative of the great distinction between 

 European and American ecological development. European botanists had, of 

 necessity, to work upon a vegetation which could be considered natural only by 

 a considerable exercise of imagination, whereas the American school had as its 

 subject vast areas of country over which the influence of man had scarcely been 

 felt at all. It is not surprising in this circumstance that American ecology 

 developed very rapidly and, in many directions, soon attained a leading position. 



Although it has been convenient to regard plant ecology as stemming from 

 Schimper and Warming, it needs to be stressed that this really marks the for- 

 mal separation of the subject — its coming of age — rather than its birth, for 

 these were certainly not the first publications written from the ecological stand- 

 point. There were, for instance, the studies of Graebner (1895) and others on the 

 North German heaths in the earlier 'nineties; and, especially, Drude's account 

 in 1890 of the plant formations of Central Europe, which actually incorporated 

 some forms of later ecological nomenclature. Earlier still, in the 'eighties, there 

 were Krasnov's account of some of the Russian steppes (1886), Sargent's 



