THE 
HEW PHYTOhOGIST. 
Vol. 4. No. 9. 
November 29 TH, 1905 . 
ECOLOGY IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PHYTO- 
TOPOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS. 1 
By F. F. Blackman and A. G. Tansley. 
R CLEMENTS’ hook is at once the most ambitious and most 
important general work on Ecology that has been published 
during the last seven years. Warming’s “ Plantesamfund ”—better 
known in its German dress as “ CEcologische Pflanzengeographie ”— 
performed the indispensable service of gathering up the scattered 
ecological work of several decades and presenting it under a single 
clear and comprehensive point of view. How excellently the Danish 
Professor performed that service is well known to all who have read 
his model text-book. A few years later Schimper presented the 
results of many years of travel and enquiry in a magnificent volume 
—the “ Pflanzengeographie auf physiologischer Grundlage.” The 
wide knowledge of the author, extending over the vegetation of 
many lands, his many-sided treatment of the subject-matter, the 
industry and ingenuity with which he used every available source of 
information to throw light on the infinitely varied conditions of plant- 
life, and finally the wealth of pictorial illustration by means of 
which he brought home to his less travelled readers the aspects of 
vegetation all over the world, combined to render his work at once 
important as a contribution to science, encyclopaedic as a record of 
what was known, and fascinating as an unrivalled picture-book of 
vegetation. 
The immediate result of the publication of these two pioneer works 
was to stimulate interest in this branch of botany all over the world* 
Everywhere young botanists turned to the vegetation around them 
and began to observe and record. In so far as it took workers out 
of doors and turned fresh attention to the phenomena of plant-life 
under the conditions of nature, this effect was all to the good. But 
1 “ Research Methods in Ecology.” By F. E. Clements, Ph.D., 
Associate Professor of Plant Physiology in the University of 
Nebraska. Pp. XVII. and 334. 85 Figures in the text. 
§3- Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.A. 
