6 Annals Entomological Society of America [Vol. VIII, 
And now what shall we say of that view of ecology by which 
man, with his unrivalled powers of action and influence—the 
center and source of the most amazing interactions ever known 
between an animal species and its environment—is left prac- 
tically outside the natural system, or is looked upon at best as 
a merely monstrous overgrowth of it—a pathological influence, 
a destructive enemy of nature, all whose works are artificial 
as compared with the natural effects and products of the vital 
activities of ants and caterpillars and crawfishes. There are 
ecologists to whom primitive nature is the earthly paradise, 
and civilized man isa kind of fiend, a Satan bent upon its destruc- 
tion—a triumphant Satan who seems bound to reduce the whole 
earth, except, perhaps, the national parks, zoological gardens, 
bird preserves, and the like, to conditions as unnatural, as 
abnormal, as those of a prison or a hospital. Their ecology 
is a system not of this present time but of the world before 
Adam, before the fall of man had introduced into the world 
the germs of that fatal and frightfully contagious disease known 
as civilization. 
And there are entomologists whom any trace of humanistic 
values in their entomology seemingly repels almost like a 
taint of disease or decay. They remind one of the famous 
English mathematician who is reported to have said that he 
thanked his God every day on his bended knees that he had 
never discovered anything useful. This attitude is of course 
their privilege, as a matter of personal choice, just as it is the 
privilege of the ecologist to specialize in the field of uncivilized 
nature, or of the paleontologist to study a vanished system 
of life by means of its fossilized remains; but to represent these 
divisions of the subject as any more normal or natural or im- 
portant than that phase or stage of the natural system which 
embraces civilized man, is not only misleading but, in my 
judgment, injurious. The ecological system of the existing 
twentieth century world must include the twentieth century 
man as its dominant species—dominant not in the sense of the 
plant ecologist, as simply the most abundant—for which idea 
prevalent would, I think, be a better term—but dominant in 
the sense of dynamic ecology, as the most influential, the 
controlling or dominant member of his associate group. 
