It is perhaps significant that the genetic or successional relations of habitats and associations, as contrasted with their descriptive classification, both in plants and animals, have in the past been developed, not by the ecological students who live and work among conditions greatly modified by man, as in parts of Europe, but in the newer, less modified America. In this respect a parallel exists to the development of our knowledge and the process and genetic interpretation of topography, which has also developed more rapidly in America than elsewhere. The process and genetic method which has developed in this physical science has now spread to the biological sciences and has found a fertile soil there for development on account of the _relatively_ undisturbed biotic conditions which still persist in certain areas. In this connection it may be worth while to indicate some of the ecological disadvantages under which the non-ecological surveys are carried on. As a rule, such surveys feel no strong obligation to record fully the conditions of the environment, or its developmental processes. The environment is considered as static, and not as a changing medium; it has no past or future, it has merely horizontal extension. The problem as to its _dynamic status_, whether in a condition of stress, in the process of adjustment, or in relative equilibrium, is not raised, or if it should be, it could not be handled. The student eager for new and little-known species is not the one to study such relations, at least, as a rule, this has not been his practice. So long as the success of a day’s work is measured by the length of the list of novelties secured, rather than by the quality and quantity of ecological relations discovered, such students and surveys will not contribute greatly to our knowledge of the economy of nature in the regions surveyed.