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Aspects of Ecology. 
their views. The ecologist is sadly in need of the more intimate 
and exact methods of the physiologist: the latter must take his 
experiments into the field, and must recognize more fully that 
function is but the middleman between habitat and plant. It seems 
probable that the final name for the whole field will be physiology, 
although the term ecology has distinct advantages of brevity and 
of meaning.” 
With the general sense of the foregoing passage we are in 
cordial agreement. No one can doubt that ecological problems are 
at bottom physiological problems; and while the present super¬ 
ficiality of ecology must be admitted, it is, we think, equally true 
that the outlook of the typical modern physiologist requires 
widening, in the direction of realising much more vividly the neces¬ 
sity of studying a plant’s functions under its natural conditions of 
life. In fact the serious application of the methods and concepts of 
modern physiology to ecological problems is now certainly an urgent 
desideratum. 
At the same time it should, we think, be clearly recognised that 
there is a sense in which physiology is distinct from ecology, and 
that the proper function of the physiologist in the narrower sense 
is essentially “ intensive and analytical,” since it is, or should be, 
his special business to analyse the vital processes into their consti¬ 
tuent factors, which in nature normally work together, and to show 
how these factors may be brought into line with chemical and 
physical laws. The “ extreme specialistic tendencies ” deplored by 
Dr. Clements must in our opinion be allowed full play, and the 
“ analytic methods,” which, as he says, “ have dominated research 
to the exclusion of synthetic ones,” should be understood as funda¬ 
mental and logically prior to the synthesis which he rightly desires. 
Modern physiology suffers not from real analytic methods, but from 
crude and misleading analysis, which fails to get to the root of the 
matter. Till we have a rational physiology, soundly based on the 
laws of chemistry and physics on the one hand, and frankly recog¬ 
nising the “ biological point of view,” i.e. the peculiar conditions 
obtaining in all living organisms, on the other, we can scarcely 
expect to gain a great deal by the extension of the arena of the 
physiologist to ecological problems. Crude concepts carried into a 
wider field cannot give anything but unsatisfactory and inconclusive 
results, and the place to clear up the confusion and arrive at clearer 
and more rational ideas is primarily the laboratory, for it is only 
there that the conditions for the necessary exactness of experiment 
