464 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



a habitat with well-defined floristic and entomological characteristics. 

 We see here an example of organic evolution aligning itself with the 

 long pursuance of human activity toward development of habitat. 

 We have much to learn in this field in Africa, one of the main cradles 

 of humanity, where man-produced habitats, such as savannah by the 

 agency of fire, have developed their own ungulate faunas. Time has 

 had its chance, unaffected by glaciation or major changes of climate. 



Some of the shocks of human impact on biological communities 

 may have turned the Americans the more surely to study such organic 

 entities as inextricable webs of plants and animals ; one of Shelf ord's 

 pupils, W. C. Allee, expressed the notion of unconscious cooperation 

 in biological conmimiities, a concept so much easier to elucidate from 

 studying plants and animals together. Some measure of the 'psychic 

 awareness' not obvious to Tansley in 1920 was now seen to be present 

 in the enlarged wholes of biological communities which we accept 

 nowadays. Alice's unconscious cooperation was entirely scientific 

 and utterly removed from the wishful thinking or pious hopefulness 

 of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. All the same, Allee brought warmth 

 and light into a field which had tended to be chillingly botanical. 



But the strings of past philosophy trail round our feet, making 

 us conservative from a sense of prudence rather than reason. Judaic 

 monotheism put man and nature apart, an idea strengthened by Car- 

 tesian dualism of mind and matter. The older Dionysian intuition 

 of wholeness was heresy, and the ancient Chinese comprehension of 

 a universe of checks and balances and compensations, in which man 

 was essentially a part and no more, was unknown and unscientific 

 anyway. Hence, far into our own day, man was not a proper part of 

 the study of ecology. If you studied man you might have been an 

 anthropologist or an archeologist or a historian, but if you studied 

 ecology you dealt with nature as she was conceived to be and not with 

 man. The notion of human ecology was considered not to be schol- 

 arly, though such a man as Patrick Geddes had made most illuminating 

 contributions to the ecology of human life and had collaborated with 

 J. A. Thomson who held this rostrum so long. Also, there were sev- 

 eral people in manifestly defiined fields such as geography, sociology, 

 epidemiology, and social anthropology, who were jumping on this 

 new bandwagon and calling their subjects human ecology. Ecologists 

 would have none of it. They were aware of the wide spread of their 

 subject and of their dependence on good taxonomy; there was some 

 suspicion already that an ecologist might be a jack of all trades and 

 master of none, and it was academic suicide to be an ecologist except 

 incidentally to an acknowledged position in botany or zoology. The 

 ultimate necessity of considering the biological community as a work- 

 ing whole, ecology being as it were the physiology of community, pro- 



