THE VALUE OF ECOLOGICAL SURVEYS 33 



who is sent on some museum expedition. The 

 wealthy donor of the funds may wish to see a room 

 filled with specimens on the return of the ethnologist, 

 so that materials which have bulk and make a show- 

 ing take precedence over detailed studies of the 

 habits, traditions, languages, and descriptions of 

 the people, because such studies require appreciation 

 rather than inspection for evaluation. The zoolog- 

 ical student may meet with just the same kind of 

 difficulty. His institutional authorities often judge 

 values by the cubic foot and pound, rather than 

 by the quality of relations discovered. The student 

 himself who has had an extensive collecting ex- 

 perience, in which quantity and variety have been 

 the ideal, finds it difficult to return from a day's 

 work with only a few pages of notes on the responses 

 of the animals, and with perhaps only a few specimens. 

 With such an understanding of the general rules 

 of the game we may turn to the application or art 

 of ecology, to indicate its relation to general problems. 

 With a grounding in the general principles of organic 

 response to the total environment, one is able to see 

 that the disturbances due to man are a problem in 

 the adjustment of the highest type of animal, as a 

 member of an animal association, to its complete 

 environment. The "control of nature" for which 

 men strive is the process of making the environments 

 and associations to order. The disturbances in the 

 natural order may be looked upon as so many huge 

 experiments or trial activities in this process of 

 adjustment. 



