28 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY | Vol. 2 



result, whore otherwise we ought really to say nothing at all; and the 

 statistical method of record and report has always the great advan- 

 tage that it conveys perfectly definite information, and that it gives 

 us a structure of fact to which the next man may safely build. It 

 enables us to accumulate results by adding one like unit of construc- 

 tion to another, whereas otherwise each little structure must stand by 

 itself for what it appears to-be worth. I confidently expect to see 

 this aid to accurate work more and more used in -coming years, until 

 a paper Avhose data of observation and experiment are not summed up 

 in statistical tables or their equivalent will be as rare as the old-style 

 paper of deductive inference to economic measures is today. 



Next to the command and use of this method of statistics — a com- 

 pleted method ready-made to our hands, and which we have only to 

 appropriate and adapt to our ends — I have come to look, of recent 

 years, with eager interest to the new and still developing methods of 

 ecology as an aid to our w^ork on our larger and more difficult problems. 

 Economic entomology is, in fact, a special division of ecology. It has 

 to do with the relations of insects to the welfare of man. It is the 

 science of the interactions, direct and indirect, between man on the 

 one hand and insects on the other, in so far as these interactions affect 

 human welfare. The welfare of man is the primary study, and en- 

 tomology comes into the field only in a secondary way. Now the 

 ecologist studies, analyzes, classifies, generalizes and interprets the re- 

 lations of interaction between all organisms and their entire environ- 

 ment, inorganic and organic. On the side of the environment he stud- 

 ies all features and factors which in any way condition or affect the 

 life of animals and plants ; on the side of the organism he studies all 

 the reactions, adaptations and immediate or final effects which are in 

 any way traceable to the factors of the environment ; and on both sides 

 of the relation he seeks for causes, for principles, for laws, which are 

 permanent and invariable because they are involved in the nature of 

 things — in the nature of protoplasm on the one hand, and in that of 

 the physical world on the other. 



So regarded and so studied, ecology evidently lies at the very center 

 of biology. Indeed, it is practically identical with biology as de- 

 fined, perhaps most clearly, by that great zoologist — that great natur- 

 alist — Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, who says in the introduction to his 

 remarkable volume on "The Foundations of Zoology," that life is 

 response to the order of nature, that biology is the study of this re- 

 sponse — of this reaction ; and that the study of the order of nature to 

 which response is made is as well within the province of biology as a 

 study of the living organism which responds. Upon this topic of en- 



