Pioneer Support for Ecology.

Soon after its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution of Washington established a program in plant ecology, located initially at the Desert Laboratory at Tucson. Ecology was only then emerging from nineteenth century natural history and physiology and becoming a scientific discipline distinct from both. Plant ecology, in the work of Forrest Shreve and F. E. Clements, under the aegis of the Carnegie Institution, was a most significant part of this emergence, attacking problems not considered by the experimental physiology that had come to the fore in the nineteenth century in ways not used in classical natural history. (Accepted for publication 3 September 1982) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]