FIRST FOUR DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



67 



These articles are not necessarily review 

 articles. They may merely collate certain 

 segments of information without any inter- 

 pretation. During the 1931 to 1942 period 

 the areas of ecology most frequently sub- 

 jected to such synthesis were {a) the 

 community; (i>) population problems, both 

 intraspecihc and interspecific; (c) society 

 and social integration; and {d) other 

 aspects. 



There is not time, nor is this tlie place, 

 to discuss the contributions of these articles, 

 and others like them, to ecological theory. 

 That will come later when attention is fo- 

 cussed on specific principles. In general 

 terms the point can be made that ecologists 

 were trying to find a natural pattern into 

 which the data of ecology could be ap- 

 portioned. This was true whether the 

 individual, the population, the society, or 

 the community was studied. This led theo- 

 retically minded students to the question of 

 integration— the mechanism by which an 

 ecological unit maintains that unity in the 

 face of continual environmental impact. 

 Some of the analyses were mathematical, 

 some experimental, and some observational. 

 But they were all concerned with this preg- 

 nant question, and all seemed to suggest 

 that when ecology attains a greater theo- 

 retical orientation, it will emerge as a 

 science of greater stature. As pointed out in 

 the Introduction, this is a perspective shared 

 by the authors of the present book.* 



CONCLUSION 



This concludes our treatment of the 

 growth of twentieth century animal ecology. 

 Before closing this chapter, however, a brief 

 review of the forty years considered as a 

 whole seems appropriate. It is our wish 

 here to point out certain of the major his- 

 torical trends in ecology as well as to draw 

 some parallels between the growth of that 

 science and historical phenomena geneially. 



In 1900 the basic ecological emphasis 

 was relatively simple. Most biologists were 

 aware of the fact that an organism lived in 



° An interesting ecological development of 

 the fourth decade that deserves special mention 

 was the organization of field classes to study 

 nocturnal animal communities. Although this 

 was not a completely new venture, its routine 

 adoption did not occur until the early thirties. 

 A note by Orlando Park and H. F. Strohecker 

 ( 1936 ) pointed out the potentialities of such 

 night study. 



an exploitable environment, and now and 

 then this environment-organism nexus was 

 subjected to analysis. However, the analysis 

 was concerned with that problem as an 

 individual instance. There was not much 

 interest in generalization or theory We 

 pointed out this fact in the Introduction to 

 this book. The early workers, through intel- 

 hgent and enthusiastic labor, unearthed 

 many significant data, and it would be 

 stupid to underestimate their contributions. 

 As the years wore on, a need arose for the 

 integration of facts and concepts. This had 

 a salubrious effect on the development of 

 ecology. It sharpened the awareness of 

 workers to the existence of new and un- 

 solved problems. It brought younger 

 investigators into the field. It demanded the 

 adoption of new techniques developed by 

 other sciences and technologies. It increased 

 the outlets for discussion, pubhcation, re- 

 view, criticism, and intellectual intercourse 

 generally. 



The twentieth century now can be con- 

 sidered briefly in a more specific way. In 

 the early nineteen hundreds the prime em- 

 phasis was on autecology. Investigators 

 followed either the path of natural history, 

 in which case they were interested, say, 

 in the life cycle of an organism or in its 

 habitat or adaptational morphology, or they 

 entered by the physiological route and 

 studied the behavior, the development, or 

 the toleration of an organism in relation to 

 its immediate environment. With the pass- 

 ing years, work of this type appropriated 

 some of the skills perfected in other 

 sciences, with the result that environmental 

 measurements became more precise and 

 refined. This seems to be the status of aute- 

 cology somewhere in the early twenties. 

 Thereafter, ecologists became interested in 

 "conditions of existence," and there arose 

 a more comprehensive autecology with em- 

 phasis on the analysis of a wide variety of 

 organism-environment relations. This had a 

 final efiFect of incorporating a large body of 

 autecological facts in text and reference 

 books, many of which have been men- 

 tioned. 



Synecological studies lagged behind aute- 

 cological. There is an obvious explanation 

 for this. The former are inherently more 

 difficult and require a greater background 

 of fact and theory. In the early part of the 

 century there were some sound data on 

 group relations both for aquatic and ter- 



