ECOLOGICAL 45 



of sea and land, with meteorology and climatology, and all these 

 from earliest times and conditions onward. The like, too, for bio- 

 geography and palaeontology, with the appearance of characteristic 

 forms, so often with new ways of life, and their successful adaptation 

 and widening distribution; yet often, too, their disappearance, for 

 reasons we as yet mostly guess at, but which we would fain more 

 clearly discern. Each great palaeontologic scene has thus to be 

 interpreted in time, and as an act of the life-drama preceding our 

 contemporary one, in part no doubt detached from ours, yet in part 

 also indispensably associated, and in ways we have to trace. One 

 great principle is more and more clear ; that with each great change 

 of the geologic scene, with its manifold extinctions of forms often 

 long dominant, new types have appeared to fill the places thus 

 vacated, and often in strangely parallel ways of life, not only in the 

 comparatively less changing sea and in inland waters, but in the air, 

 and above all on land. Throughout all this has, of course, continued 

 the elemental association of plant and animal life, and the depen- 

 dence of the latter upon the former. Ever-increasing elaborations and 

 intricacies of this widest adaptation have appeared, and similarly 

 among both plants and animals. The conditions of our own human 

 advent upon the life-stage, its ecologic conditioning throughout the 

 past, and our ever-increasing human reaction upon living nature 

 also (so largely destructive, yet not without selectively co-operative 

 adaptation as well), thus fully bring us into the present scene, of the 

 historic Eco-drama of Life in Evolution. 



Concretely, then, as the modern movement of science becomes 

 more comprehensively understood and applied in life and education, 

 and as the fundamental sciences of the inorganic cosmos continue 

 their intellectual progress and their practical applications, the 

 present eclipse of "natural history" by them will not continue. As 

 we are aided and strengthened by these preliminary studies and 

 appliances, these will be more and more applied towards the better 

 understanding of life in nature, and of its guidance in man. Scholar 

 and student will know more of the inorganic world of heavens and 

 earth, more of the mechanical, physical, and chemical sciences than 

 ever, and of their arts as well; yet they will more and more utilise 

 them all towards the essential studies of old described as "Natural 

 and Civil History", and now as the sciences of life in evolution, 

 organic and social. Are we asked. How dare we predict this?— the 

 answer is open to all eyes. Our own lives are not only individual, 

 but in intricate natural and human associations, and these in our 

 respective regions of Nature. Our human homes and larger hives — 

 be these village or town, city or metropolis — are still fundamentally 

 regional; and our achievements are adaptations to nature's order in 

 its evolution at best, or else disharmonies, and to its and our loss 

 accordingly. Each region, each of its human groupings too, however 



