Volume 8 
Number 7 
The Plant World 
& of popular iSotanp 
JULY, 1905 
I. 
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ECOLOGICAL WORK IN 
BOTANY.* 
By Howard S. Reed, Ph.D., 
The University of Missouri. 
In these days the student of botany hears much of the study of 
ecology under one name or another. Colleges and universities 
admit it as a study among other botanical courses’; botanical 
periodicals devote much of their space to descriptions and photo¬ 
graphs of the flora of “ Brush Creek ” and “ Driftwood Lake ”; 
and finally the programs of scientific academies are replete with 
papers upon ecological topics which bear evidence to the present 
activity in this line of study. It may be, therefore, that some 
notes on the history of studies along ecological lines may be of 
interest to the student and teacher. 
We have had several excellent summaries of recent progress in 
ecological studies and some attempts to outline its future, but few 
have dealt with the work which has stood the test of time. It 
must not be inferred from this that the subject is without a his¬ 
tory or that it is ashamed of its history. But it is reasonable to 
* Contribution No. 5 from the Botanical Laboratory of the University 
of Missouri. The writer wishes to take this opportunity of expressing his 
thanks to Dr. William Trelease, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 
for his generous kindness in allowing him the use of valuable library 
material from that institution. 
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