You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Before I launch into my presentation of the evening I wish to make one comment about a certain setting that I wish to emphasize. It deals more particularly with my use of an unusual term in medicine but one much in vogue in the biological sciences. It is the term ecology—or as we shall see more clearly the large problem of adaptation to physico-chemical, to sensorimotor, and to symbolic or sociogenic forces within the organism and in the environment. Just why I introduce this apparently strange term I hope will become clearer as I proceed.
Ecology is a word that stands for a development of natural history. Certain writers have said it was nothing more than scientific natural history which may be said to have been inaugurated by Buffon in the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, continued by von Humboldt, Malthus, Darwin, Goeffrey St. Hilaire to Haeckel, who in 1869 first popularized the word Oecology and defined it best, for the purpose to which I would put it, as “the study of the relation of the animal to its organic as well as its inorganic environment, particularly its friendly or hostile relations to those animals or plants with which it comes in contact”. Haeckel spoke of it as the ‘general economy of the household of nature’. In more modern phraseology, then, the study of “adaptation of man as a whole to the whole of the cosmos”.
This is the principle—only fragments of which I can hope to offer for your kindly consideration.
Even the amateur naturalist notes early the numerous devices by which the ‘struggle for existence’ is facilitated and how adaptive activities hint at environmental variations. As a youth tramping over the higher Adirondack metamorphic gneiss rocks, running across a specimen of the rare walking fern—Camptosorus—meant that a limestone inclusion must have been found and that further search would