XO THE FOUNDATION OF ECOLOGY 



Such a general survey has the purpose and value of a reconnaissance, and 

 is always the first step in the accurate and detailed investigation of the 

 local area or formation. Each corrects the extreme tendency of the other, 

 and thorough comprehensive work can be done only by combining the two 

 methods. When the field of inquiry is a large area or covers a whole re- 

 gion, the procedure should be essentially the same. A third stage must be 

 added, however, in which a more careful survey is made of the entire field 

 in the light of the thorough study of the local area. The writer's methods 

 in the investigation of the Colorado vegetation illustrate this procedure. 

 The summers of 1896, 1897, 1898 were devoted to reconnaissance; those of 

 1899-1904 were given to detailed and comprehensive study by instrument 

 and quadrat of a highly diversified, representative area less than 20 miles 

 square, while the work of tlie final summer will be the application of the 

 results obtained in this localized area to the region traversed from 1896-98. 

 This is practically the application of methods of precision to an area of more 

 than 100,000 square miles. It also serves to call attention to another point 

 not properly appreciated as yet by those who would do ecological work. 

 This is the need of taking up field problems as a result of serious fore- 

 thought, and not as a matter of accident or mere propinquity. A carefully 

 matured plan of attack which contemplates an expenditure of time and 

 energy for a number of years will yield results of value, no matter how 

 much attention an area may have received. On the other hand, an aimless 

 or hurried excursion into the least known or richest of regions will lead to 

 nothing but a waste of time, especially upon the part of the ecologist, who 

 must read the articles which result, if only for the purpose of making sure 

 that there is nothing in them. 



APPLICATIONS OF ECOLOGY 



16. The subjects touched by ecology. The applications of ecological 

 methods and results to other departments of botany, and to other fields of 

 research are numerous. Many of these are both intimate and fundamental, 

 and give promise of affording new and extremely fruitful points of view. 

 It has already been indicated that ecology bears the closest of relations to 

 morphology and histology on the one side, and to physiology on the other 

 that it is, indeed, nothing but a rational field physiology, which regards 

 form and function as inseparable phenomena. The closeness with which it 

 touches plant pathology follows directly from this, as pathology is nothing 

 more than abnormal form and functioning. Experimental work in ecology 

 is purely a study of evolution, and the facts of the latter are the materials 

 with which taxonomy deals. Forestry has already been termed "applied 



