CURRENT LITERATURE. 

 Henry S. Graves, in Charge. 



Research Methods in Ecology. By F. E. Clements. Lincoln, 

 1905. 334 PP- Illustrated. 



Some years ago the reviewer defined silviculture as applied 

 ecology. If this is a correct definition, then this volume, the first 

 of its kind in the English, and perhaps in any language, must be 

 welcome to students of forestry. Indeed, it is full of interest 

 from cover to cover, not in recording facts, but pointing out the 

 methods of securing facts of ecological import. Foresters have 

 studied ecology for a hundred years in an unsystematic way, and 

 so did botanists, but only within the last ten years has ecology 

 been systematically developed into a science by itself as a branch 

 of general biology, the name appearing for the first time in E. 

 Warming's Oekologiske Plantegeografi, 1895, although to Grise- 

 bach belongs the credit of having laid the corner-stone of the 

 science by pointing out the plantformation as the fundamental 

 feature of vegetation as early as 1838. Since Warming's book a 

 large literature has accumulated, discussing ecological relations, 

 and a new, comprehensive terminology has developed, which in 

 itself is needful to the forestry student if he would be abreast of 

 the times in his forest descriptions and in reading modern eco- 

 logical literature. 



Briefly, the study of the relation of plant or plant formation to 

 habitat is ecolog3^ We cannot agree with the author in attempt- 

 ing to make this study co-extensive with botany or to identify 

 ecology with physiology, and we think his attempt a failure. 

 We accentuate this because, we believe, there is a tendency to 

 make definitions of our arts and sciences too all-inclusive, there- 

 by losing the value of segregation. While, of course, in nature 

 there is a continued inter-dependence of everything that we seek 

 to classify into separate branches, it is most useful to hold on to 

 such classifications, which denote mere differences of the point of 

 view from w^hich the study is carried on : physiology has been 

 the study of functions in the single individual, and the name had 

 best be retained for this, while a very distinct point of view is 

 expres.sed in the term ecology, which, to be sure, in its manifes- 



