44 



LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Tlie ecologist thus needs and seeks to know the stage on which 

 the life-drama is being played, and has been played of old. He 

 utilises all he can learn of present geography and distribution, and 

 of that increasingly vivid reconstruction of past conditions and 

 bygone forms of life which geologist and palaeontologist are so 

 admirably outlining; since his effort is to realize all organisms in 

 their life at its completest, and thus see Nature as a concrete whole. 

 Not merely therefore life as "the result and sum of organic func- 

 tionings"; nor of these "as resisting death", and even this for the 

 species, beyond the individual, nor even simply "the adjustment of 



Mo. 13. 



C omiiuMisahsm hi-twcrn .1 Hermit Crab, luipagurus, ami several Sea- 

 AiHinoiics. I'"rom a specimen. 



internal to external relations"; and so on: though each of these 

 generalised statements is true. Ecology seeks to define more and 

 more precisely how environment in general determines life, and 

 particular environments particular lives; and beyond this funda- 

 ment. il setting of the scene, its main interest is with the reaction of 

 organic lives to their environment, with their evolutionary advance, 

 arrest or decline accordingly. 



F^ological studies then fundamentally demand all we can learn 

 of the environment of life; so here clear outlines, like those of 

 Henderson for Its phvsical and chemical conditioning and "fitpess", 

 are indispensable. After these we come to the physical geography 



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