72 Proceedings 
The Meeting then resolved itself into an ordinary Evening 
Meeting. 
Present 22. 
Miss Ethel Sargant, our delegate, gave her Report of S.E. 
Union Meetings at Winchester and delivered a lecture entitled 
A Modern Development of Field Botany, of which the follow- 
ing report is an abstract :— 
Ecology is the study of the interaction between plants and 
their habitat, and its subject matter falls naturally under those 
two heads. 
The modern science of ecology endeavours to measure with 
all possible accuracy the external conditions which affect a 
species or a group of species 7 sétw. ‘These conditions constitute 
the habitat: they are of two kinds, physical and organic. The 
physical conditions include details of climate and soil. The 
complete ecologist requires, besides a meteorological outfit, in- 
struments for obtaining samples of soil at various depths, and a 
field laboratory for analysing such samples. Organic conditions 
depend on the neighbouring animals and plants. The character- 
istic vegetation of any spot is due even more to the competition 
of plants with each other than to the physical conditions, or the 
influence of animals present in the district. It is the balance of 
all these conditions which determines what plants shall survive 
these. 
The facts of plant distribution in any locality are recorded 
on detailed maps. In certain selected areas the ecologist may 
even record every individual plant on a large-scale chart of a 
square metre of ground. In maps on smaller scale this is of course 
impossible. 
The methods of modern ecology are indeed largely those of 
a botanical land-surveyor, and ecology bears the same sort of 
relation to botanical geography as land-surveying to physical 
geography. 
Meeting held at Reigate, Dec. 3rd, 1909. 
Present 20 members and friends. 
The Rev. E. W. Bowell, M.A., of Penshurst, read the follow- 
ing paper :— 
