4 NATURE AND RELATIONS OF BIO-ECOLOGY 



Equally imperative is the thorough-going utilization of experiment, 

 essential not only to finer analysis and more exact measurement, but 

 also to increasingly objective viewpoints. 



In connection with the preceding, it should be realized that prog- 

 ress in zoo-ecology has been much slower. The natural unity has 

 been obscured by the separate treatment of taxonomic groups and by 

 such faunistic concepts as that of life zone, which, in view of the wide- 

 spread destruction of many species, has rendered synthetic interpreta- 

 tion very difficult. Moreover, although animals are obviously physio- 

 logical in their response to climate, food, etc., much progress can be 

 made in the field of interactions (coactions and reactions) without the 

 use of physiological experiments. Furthermore, the correlations involved 

 are usually to be suggested by studies in the biotic community and then 

 lead properly to physiological experiments that permit more definite 

 control and exact analysis. In sharp contrast to i)lant physiology, 

 animal physiology as taught and applied has little concern with physi- 

 cal factors, while general physiology deals with particular internal 

 processes and physiological ecology with one or more species with- 

 drawn from the community for some particular study. The conse- 

 quence is the ignoring or splitting of the physiology of interactions, 

 since this field finds its inspiration in the study of the biotic com- 

 munity itself. 



A signal extension of ecological ideas is involved in the applica- 

 tion of climax and succession, that is of development, to lake and 

 ocean. This demands the definition and recognition of climaxes in 

 large bodies of water, and hence of corresponding climates. As indi- 

 cated later in the discussion, this is deemed a logical extension of 

 these terms from land to land and water, and thence into lake and 

 ocean. This further involves questions of dominance, of competition, 

 reaction and coaction, of development and structure, all of which 

 exhibit more or less characteristic differences in deep water. 



Relations of Paleo-ecology. Development is a continuous process, 

 and hence its division on the basis of time past and present can be 

 justified only on the score of convenience. No radical division exists 

 in geology, where the flow of time is registered chiefly by major and 

 minor events. "With biology and its human subdivisions, however, 

 the technique and usually the evidence also differ so much in nature 

 or form that the distinction appears much greater than it is. This 

 fact has naturally not jMissed unnoticed by paleontologists, but it is 

 the peculiar province of jnileo-ecology to insist upon the basic essence 

 of continuing development and to emphasize the fact that the present 

 is but a passing stage of this. 



