240 POPULATIONS OF THE SEA 



The etymological confusion ma}' be illustrated and perhaps 

 clarified by a brief account of a controversy which took place in 

 1902. Prof. F. W. Very (1902, p. 473) asserted, "Scientific descrip- 

 tions remain unintelligible to the lazy man who hates to use the 

 dictionary; they are free property to all who are willing to take 

 this trouble." 



A correspondent, Horace White (1902), then Editor of the New 

 York Evening Post, wrote in the next number of Science that he 

 had decided to vindicate himself against this charge of laziness, 

 and so had looked up two words which had appeared in the same 

 number as that in which this statement was made. The words 

 he selected were "ecology" and "ecological." He found, in fact, 

 that, so spelt, both were absent from the dictionaries he con- 

 sulted, naming Webster's, Murray's, and others. The Editor of 

 Science confirmed (1902, p. 511) that these words could not be 

 found in these foremost authorities and asked for help. There were 

 replies from prominent dictionary editors and a long correspond- 

 ence followed in which Bather and other leading zoologists took 

 part, ending in an essay by Wheeler (1902). 



Several points emerged from all this: 



1. The two words were in the dictionaries quoted but under the 

 letter O, and were shown as beginning with the dipthong oe; the 

 noun cekologie having been first used by Haeckel (1866) in his 

 Generelle Morphologie. 



2. Although The Madison Botanical Congress, 1893 (23 and 24 

 August) had recommended that the anglicized spelling ecology 

 should be adopted and had given its definition as "broadly the 

 study of all forms of adaptations of organisms to their en\'iron- 

 ment," this anglicized spelling had not found its way into the 

 dictionaries. 



3. There was confusion among some French and German writers 

 about the meaning of cekologie, biologie, and ethologie, and a 

 tendency to equate them. 



Pearse (1939) rightly wrote that "at the beginning of the 

 twentieth century ecology was a young, l:)ut an established, science, 

 and such eminent ecologists as Wasmann (1901), Dahl (1901), 



