ECOLOGICAL BACKGROUND AND GROWTH BEFORE 1900 



33 



ency is by no means new, but stems rather 

 from the long line of excellent naturalists, 

 whether travelers or stay-at-homes, who 

 contributed much to the background of 

 the subject. This is not the place to set 

 forth the needed history of natural history; 

 combined with what has aheady been said 

 on the subject, the barest outline must suf- 

 fice. Basic as is their service to ecology, we 

 must pass over the host of taxonomists of 

 the latter half of the nineteenth century, 

 except as they contributed directly to eco- 

 logical observation. 



The contributions of the Greek, Roman, 

 and earlier natxiraHsts of northern Europe 

 have already been mentioned. The writings 

 of many others have been or will be dis- 

 cussed in other connections. We want to call 

 attention to such observations as those fur- 

 nished by Martin (1698), who gave an 

 early description of the breeding and some- 

 thing of the populations of the sea birds of 

 St. Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, and to 

 those of White (1789), who described the 

 natural history of his native village of 

 Selborne. 



The varied contributions of explorers 

 and collectors hke Bates, Belt, and Hum- 

 boldt, and of observers hke Fabre, Forel, 

 and the Peckhams, to name no more, are 

 not limited merely to the background of 

 modern ecology; then: observations often 

 emerge into the foreground. 



Wallace's Island Life and Malay Archi- 

 pelago, Bates' Naturalist on the Amazons, 

 Belt's Naturalist in Nicaragua, Fabre's 

 fascinating accounts of the habits of insects 

 of the countryside in France, Audubon's 

 recently reprinted Birds of North America 

 and Brehm's From North Pole to Equator, 

 with his greatly expanded Tierlehen— again 

 to name no more— are still desirable reading 

 for any alert animal ecologist. 



Louis Agassiz, the many-sided naturalist, 

 played an important role in laying the 

 foundation on which ecology was later 

 built. In 1846, when he was almost forty 

 years old, Agassiz came to America from 

 his native Switzerland with an established 

 reputation based on teaching and on much 

 scholarly work with fossil and Living fishes 

 and on his study of glaciers. His later 

 scientific work was also of high quahty. In 

 America, Agassiz had an extraordinary 

 career as a naturahst both at home and on 

 expeditions. His influence as a lecturer and 

 above all as a teacher revivified the study of 



nature in this country and made naturalists 

 more respected members of many com- 

 munities. He taught the men who in turn 

 trained the pioneer American ecologists. His 

 final success was with a summer seaside 

 laboratory on Penikese Island off Woods 

 Hole, Massachusetts, established in 1873, 

 the year after Anton Dolirn completed the 

 first building of the zoological station at 

 Naples. Agassiz at the Penikese laboratory 

 exerted an influence on American biology 

 out of all proportion to the length of the 

 short summer session in this, the last year 

 of his Hfe." 



The naturaUsts of the later decades of 

 the nineteenth century rounded out certain 

 phases of ecology or of allied subjects in 

 approximately their present form. Thus the 

 zoogeographical regions of the world, out- 

 fined on the basis of the taxonomic relation- 

 ships of animals, and the smaller faunal 

 areas of North America and Europe re- 

 main on the maps much as the nineteenth 

 century naturafists left them. Though often 

 used, especially by nonecologists, the limits 

 of Merriam's fife zones have undergone only 

 sHght change since early in the present cen- 

 tury, and, moisture considerations aside 

 (see p. 114), they appear in modern works 

 much as Merriam outlined them in the 

 1890's. The whole vast field of tlie recipro- 

 cal relations between flowers and pollina- 

 tion by insects was largely estabhshed in 

 its present form by the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth century naturafists (cf. MiiUer, 

 1883; Knuth, 1898-1905). 



Fortunately for ecology, robust work in 

 natural history still continues in the twen- 

 tieth century and will be discussed in the 

 next chapter. 



• Many marine biological laboratories have 

 arisen as a direct or indirect result of the last- 

 ing success of Dohrn's "Stazione Zoologica" at 

 Naples and of the influence of Agassiz's 

 meteoric venture at Penikese. The Marine Bio- 

 logical Laboratory at Woods Hole is the direct 

 descendant of the latter. We wish to record 

 our judgment that many of these laboratories, 

 despite their favorable locations, have not as 

 yet had an important direct influence on the 

 development of ecological science. The more 

 recently established "Oceanographic Institu- 

 tion," also at Woods Hole, is becoming an 

 exception in its relation to the marine ecology 

 of the future. The much more humble labora- 

 tories scattered about the fresh waters of 

 Europe and the United States have been more 

 consistently important in ecological research. 



