fo 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 the final summer will be the application of the 
results obtained in this localized area to the region traversed from 1896-08. 
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 
