CONCLUSION 



There is no getting away from the fact that good ecological 

 work cannot be done in an atmosphere of cloistered calm, of 

 smooth concentrated focussing upon clean, rounded, and 

 elegant problems. Any ecological problem which is really 

 worth working upon at all, is constantly leading th-e worker 

 on to neighbouring subjects, and is constantly enlarging his 

 view of the extent and variety of animal life, and of the numerous 

 ways in which one problem in the field interacts with another. 

 In the course of field work one should have a rather uncom- 

 fortable feeling that one is not covering the whole ground, 

 that the problem is too big to tackle single-handed, and that it 

 would be worth while finding out whether So-and-so (a 

 botanist) would not be able to co-operate with benefit to both, 

 and that it might be worth while getting to know a little about 

 geology or the movements of the moon or of a dog's tail, or the 

 psychology of starlings, or any of those apparently specialised 

 or remote subjects which are always turning out to be at the 

 basis of ecological problems encountered in the field. There 

 is hardly any doubt at all that this feeling of discomfort or 

 conscience, or whatever you choose to call it, required in all 

 scientific work, if anything more than routine results are to 

 be produced, is most urgently required in ecology, which is a 

 new science. Its methods require a wholesale overhauling, 

 in order that the rich harvest of isolated facts that has been 

 gathered during the last thousand years may be welded into 

 working theories which will enable us to understand something 

 about the general mechanism of animal life in nature, and in 

 particular to obtain some insight into the means by which 

 anima} numbers are controlled. For it is failures in regula- 

 tion of numbers of various animals which form by far the 



