204 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 423. 



things are its subject-matter. This latter 

 term is at all events an acceptable syn- 

 onym, and as such may properly be used 

 as occasion requires. The question of a 

 name, therefore, is settled and may be dis- 

 missed. 



Not so, however, with the subject-matter, 

 which represents a growth from many and 

 various sources. The field of bionomics, 

 in one department or another, has been suc- 

 cessfully cultivated by Darwin, Warming, 

 Schimper, Kerner v. Marilaun, Bonnier, 

 Engler, Drude, Schwendener, Haberlandt 

 and their co-workers in the Old "World, not 

 to enumerate a growing list in the United 

 States. Some of these are known chiefly 

 through their ecological work, others have 

 conducted such work incidentally. In any 

 case these names— not unworthy ones — 

 represent ecology in their publications, 

 much as De Bary, Sachs and Gray, for ex- 

 ample, represent primarily morphology, 

 physiology and systematic botany. We 

 may, then, from their own work, better 

 than from definition, form our conception 

 of the subject. 



To begin, as we must, with Darwin, every 

 one knows that he was not a systematic 

 botanist; he sent his plants away to have 

 scientific names attached to them. Nor 

 was he a physiologist ; at any rate this was 

 the judgment of Sachs, who ought to know. 

 Nor yet was he expert as a plant morphol- 

 ogist; witness his chapter on the morphol- 

 ogy of orchids; but he was the great ex- 

 ponent of ecology as it was taking form 

 during the period of his active work and 

 before it had a name. He, more than any 

 other man before or since, worked in such 

 sympathy with living things— not dried in 

 the herbarium, nor tortured on the Idino- 

 stat, nor pickled in formalin, but living, 

 living in their own way— that they un- 

 folded to him secrets they would tell no 

 other, because he could understand. 



The modern criticism of ecological stud- 

 ies seems to involve the implication that 

 final results are only to be attained by ex- 

 periment ; that observation and induction 

 are well enough, but that a plant wiU never 

 tell its story correctly until it is brought 

 to the rack. But, as a matter of fact, 

 Darwin concerned himself chiefly with 

 plants and animals as he found them. The 

 record of his work is a record primarily of 

 observation. He studied the shapes of 

 flowers as the bees left them. Following 

 the simple operations of the horticulturist, 

 he observed through many generations the 

 effects of cross- and self-fertilization. Such 

 experiments as he performed were largely 

 out of doors, simple or even crude, and 

 had no part nor lot with the refinements of 

 modern physiology. His work from be- 

 ginning to end was dominated by this one 

 great thought. He would know something 

 of the origin of living forms as we find 

 them. He would formulate a law not so 

 much to express a present reaction as a 

 habit and a history, and while aiming at 

 the elucidation of the great problem he 

 had set for himself, he was engaged, first 

 and last, in studying the origin of adapta- 

 tions, the study that constitutes ecology. 



But there have been new phases and de- 

 velopments that have greatly extended the 

 horizon of ecological study and in various 

 respects changed its immediate object. 

 Consider, for example, plant anatomy as 

 De Bary left it and as it is now pursued. 

 Dusting the volume and glancing through 

 De Bary's great work with its treatment of 

 primary and secondary growth, equivalent 

 and non-equivalent members, anomalous 

 thickenings, and more of life nature, what- 

 ever of wearied admiration may be stirred 

 by this monumental record of indefatigable 

 patience, one can not help feeling that it 

 is no longer a thing of the present day. 

 But when there came the great illuminating 



