462 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



ingly clear that important environmental influences are operative in 

 what may be called psychological factors. Social behavior can be of 

 critical quality ecologically, and this field serves, perhaps, to show 

 how inadequate and imperfect as yet is our observation, especially of 

 interspecific social behavior apparent in a complex biological com- 

 munity which includes man. The ecologist tends ultimately to con- 

 sider man as a member of the indigenous fauna if man is a primitive 

 hunter- foodgatherer, or as an introduced species if he is buffering 

 himself against the environment by civilization, developed technology, 

 and an export trade in natural resources. But there is one outstanding 

 difference between man and the rest of creation ecologically. He is a 

 political animal and in our day and age it is quite unreal to ignore 

 the political nature of man as an ecological factor. 



I am already giving the impression, perhaps, that there is such a 

 subject as human ecology, a matter which has called forth some tart 

 difference of opinion until very recently. For myself, there is no such 

 subject as human ecology; there is ecology only, which must accept 

 man as part of the field of reference ; but man can have an ecological 

 outlook in studying his own problems, whatever they are — medical, 

 agricultural, or those of labor relations. 



Haeckel coined the word oecology in 1869 and he had animals in 

 mind. There is sometliing ironical in the speculation that so ecolog- 

 ically perceptive a man as Charles Darwin probably set back the 

 study of ecology for half a century because after 1859 the paleonto- 

 logical data concerning evolution had necessarily to be gathered. 

 Ecology as we knew it 50 years ago was a botanical science primarily, 

 handicapped by a certain restriction of vision associated with those 

 whose eyes are focused on the sward. The early literature of ecology 

 gravely neglected the influence of the biotic factor on vegetation; 

 indeed, it was not until 1932 that the British Ecological Society pub- 

 lished its second journal of Animal Ecology. Shelf ord was reacting 

 to animal ecology in his studies of succession in the first decade of 

 this century and his book on animal communities appeared in 1913, 

 the same year in which C. C. Adams published his Guide to Animal 

 Ecology. 



Perhaps World War I explains the gap between 1913 and the early 

 twenties, when Charles Elton's series of papers appeared, culminating 

 in his Anim<d Ecology of 1927, giving us the fundamental ecological 

 ideas of cyclicism in populations, food chains of varying complexity 

 between species, leading to the concept of what is now known as the 

 Eltonian pyramid, and the idea of animals filling niches in the func- 

 tions of conversion of matter. Charles Adams, to whom I have al- 

 ready referred, made a profound remark to the effect that ecology 

 was a study of process — process which is not necessarily progress, 

 although the developmental quality apparent in the slow building 



