318 ECOLOGY 



referred. Our methods may not, at present, be sufficiently delicate to 

 detect such structure, or the processes which lie back of it, but we may, 

 it is believed, confidently expect the necessary methods for the detection 

 of such structures and processes, and especially their correlation with and 

 relation to the more permanent and more easily recognizable morpho- 

 logical conditions. 



We classify the responses and changes in animals as evolution, 

 modification by the environment, behavior, and physiological response. 

 Are not all these, after all, but different expressions of the same or 

 similar processes? Future investigations must answer this question, 

 and it is around this question that the future of much that is known as 

 biology hinges. 



VII. Relations of Ecology to Geography 



Ecology is primarily the study of the mores of animals and animal 

 communities. It is fundamentally a branch of physiology — the physi- 

 ology of the relations of animals to their environments. While we may 

 study in the field and in the laboratory, both types of study are commonly 

 conducted with reference to natural environments. Natural environ- 

 ments are used as the basis for study, because when natural environments 

 are destroyed, animals which can live in the new conditions select some 

 one of several possibilities which approach the normal habitat. Habits 

 appear particularly variable under these conditions. Little can be 

 gained from the study of the relations of animals to man-made environ- 

 ments, except in cases where the species has long been living under 

 such conditions and has become fully adjusted to them. 



Ecology being a subject or branch of physiology, and including 

 all of the sociological side of animal life, its relations to human geography 

 are particularly intimate. Indeed, geographers have been disappointed 

 with the data which zoology has furnished them, as these data are 

 almost exclusively data concerning the taxonomy and morphology of 

 animals. The parallelism between the geographic phenomena in animals 

 and the "relation of culture to environment" lies not in the color and 

 structural adaptations of animals, but in the behavior-characters of 

 animals which enable them to live under a given set of conditions, and 

 the behavior which those conditions produce (207, 208, 209). 



While attempting to make comparisons between human society 

 and man on the one hand, and plants and animals on the other, geog- 

 raphers, sociologists, and psychologists — in so far as I have been able 

 to read their writings along this line — have compared structure in plants 



