Article The problems of ecology
A. G. Tansley
New Phytologist (1904) 3: 191 - 200 doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8137.1904.tb07347.x
Ecology may now be considered almost a fashionable study, but there are not wanting botanists who tacitly distrust, even if they do not openly contemn, a good deal of the work which is done under its name. This hostile attitude is not always wholly to be wondered at, for the subject has its own difficulties and dangers, and these are sometimes rather distressingly patent in the papers of some of its votaries; on the other band the hostility alluded to is not seldom due to misapprehension, and it therefore appears useful to consider the subject from a general point of view in the hope of pointing out some of its dangers and of clearing up some of the misapprehension.