For these reasons, as will be pointed out in detail later, the newer viewpoints are regarded as either the most important or the most fundamental. Experimental ecology will throw a flood of light upon plant structure and function, while exact methods of studying the habitat are practically certain of universal application in the future. PRESENT STATUS OF ECOLOGY =10. The lack of special training.= The bane of the recent development popularly known as ecology has been a widespread feeling that anyone can do ecological work, regardless of preparation. There is nothing in modern botany more erroneous than this feeling. The whole task of ecology is to find out what the living plant and the living formation are doing and have done in response to definite complexes of factors, i. e., habitats. In this sense, ecology is practically coextensive with botany, and the student of a local flora who knows a few hundred species is no more competent to do ecological work than he is to reconstruct the phylogeny of the vegetable kingdom, or to explain the transmission of ancestral qualities. The comprehensive and fundamental character of the subject makes a broad special training even more requisite than in more restricted lines of botanical inquiry. The ecologist must first of all be a botanist, not a mere cataloguer of plants, and he must also possess a particular training in the special methods of ecological research. He must be familiar with the various points of attack in this field, and he must know the history of his subject thoroughly. Ecology affords the most striking example of the prevalent evil of American botanical study, i. e., an indifference to, or an ignorance of the literature of the subject. The trouble is much aggravated here, however, by the breadth of the field, and the common assumption that a special training is unnecessary, if not, indeed, superfluous. Ignorance of the important ecological literature has been a most fertile source of crude and superficial studies, a condition that will become more apparent as these fields are worked again by carefully trained investigators.