June 20, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



973 



botanists, its spelling has been altered, ap- 

 parently with no other gain than that of 

 saving a letter, or rather part of a letter, 

 and the meaning has often been modified 

 till it is almost equivalent to ' chorology, ' 

 or at any rate ' chorological oecology. ' And 

 now the zoologists are reappropriating this 

 term, modified spelling, meaning and all, in 

 a manner which reminds one of the ease of 

 the good old German word 'Faltstuhl' 

 (Eng. faldstool) which was boggled by the 

 French to ' f auteuil ' only to be again re- 

 appropriated, with much unction, in its 

 unrecognized form by both English and 

 Germans. It seems to the writer that it 

 would certainly be expedient, not to say 

 generous, for the zoologists to leave the 

 botanists in undisputed possession of the 

 term 'cecology, ' especially as they seem to 

 set some store by it. For, in the first 

 place, the term was not a very happy one 

 to begin with, no matter how we interpret 

 the oixoi; part of the word. Haeckel in- 

 tended it to mean something like the econ- 

 omy of nature ('die Lehre vom Natur- 

 haushalte ' ) , but one is at first inclined to 

 understand it as referring merely to the 

 habitat, or even to the dwelling or nest of 

 an organism. Jhis sense, in which it has 

 been understood by Wasmann {loc. cit., 

 p. 392) and many other zoologists, not to 

 mention botanists, is too narrow for the 

 purpose we have in view, as will appear 

 firom the sequel. 



Ever since the botanists adopted the 

 word 'oecology' and applied it to the im- 

 portant subject which they are exploiting 

 with such zeal and profit, there has been 

 comment to the efilect that the zoologists 

 have been unduly neglecting a very prom- 

 ising province of their science. This cer- 

 tainly involves some misconceptions. The 

 zoologists have perhaps distinguished some- 

 what more rigidly than their botanical 

 brethren between ' chorology ' and the 



proper province of ' oecology,' and in both 

 of these subjects work worthy of the great- 

 est admiration has been accomplished. 

 If we confine our attention to zoolog- 

 ical ' oecology ' we find that it begins 

 with Aristotle and Pliny, and a rapid sur- 

 vey of recent centuries shows that inves- 

 tigators like the folloAving have devoted 

 whole years of their lives to work in this 

 field: Redi, Swammerdam, Roesel von 

 Rosenhof, Reaumiu-, Bonnet, Buffon, 

 Trembly, A^liite of Selbourne, Erasmus 

 and Charles Dai'win, Wallace, Bates, Belt, 

 Hudson, Romanes, Audubon, Wilson, 

 Coues, Brehm, Houzeau, Leuckart, von 

 Siebold, Semper, Steenstrup, Fritz Miiller, 

 Fabre, Francois and Pierre Huber, Giard, 

 Plateau, Adler, Forel, Lord Avebury, Was- 

 mann, Moggridge, McCook, Adlerz, Janet, 

 Marchal, von Buttel-Reepen, Maeterlinck, 

 Riley, Grassi, Lang, Dr. and Mrs. Peckham, 

 Poulton, Silvestri, Erich Haase, Dahl, Es- 

 cherich, etc. These are but few of the many 

 whose works are scattered through the whole 

 wide range of zoological literature. And 

 thereare undoubtedly many others who have 

 investigated subjects like animal migration 

 and the myriad problems suggested by 

 whole groups of animals with which the 

 writer has only a superficial acquaintance. 

 That some botanists, and some zoologists, 

 too, for that matter, have failed to appre- 

 ciate the importance of the work accom- 

 plished by the above-mentioned ' oecologists ' 

 is easily explained. One observes that 

 only a small minority of these investigators 

 worked under university auspices. It is 

 only too evident — and only too humiliat- 

 ing—that Schopenhauer's diatribes apply 

 to the zoologists as well as to the metaphy- 

 sicians, for the investigators above men- 

 tioned were 'amateurs' in the true sense of 

 the word, i. e., lovers of animal life, and 

 most of _ them therefore lived and worked 

 untrammeled by the interminable ' Riick- 



