No comprehensive study of the human community from this standpoint has yet been made. A prospectus for such a study is outlined in an earlier chapter by Professor R. D. McKenzie, in this volume, under the title, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.”[71] Yet there are several systematic treatises and a rapidly growing literature of scientific research in the two analogous fields of plant ecology and animal ecology. The processes of competition, invasion, succession, and segregation described in elaborate detail for plant and animal communities seem to be strikingly similar to the operation of these same processes in the human community. The assertion might even be defended that the student of community life or the community organization worker might secure at present a more adequate understanding of the basic factors in the natural organization of the community from Warming’s _Oecology of Plants_ or from Adams’s _Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology_ than from any other source. In the second place, the community may be conceived in terms of the effects of communal life in a given area upon the formation or the maintenance of a local culture. Local culture includes those sentiments, forms of conduct, attachments, and ceremonies which are characteristic of a locality, which have either originated in the area or have become identified with it. This aspect of local life may be called “the cultural community.” This relationship of cultural patterns to territorial areas has not yet been adequately studied unless in the phenomena of language. What, for example, are studies in dialect but one illustration of how local areas with their entailed isolation differentially affect customs of speech? Concrete materials for a wider study of culture in relation to location are increasing, notably upon preliterate peoples and upon retarded groups geographically isolated, as the southern mountaineers or the remote inhabitants of Pitcairn Island. The immigrant colony in an American city possesses a culture unmistakably not indigenous but transplanted from the Old World. The telling fact, however, is not that the immigrant colony maintains its old-world cultural organization, but that in its new environment it mediates a cultural adjustment to its new situation. How basically culture is dependent upon place is suggested by the following expressions, “New England conscience,” “southern hospitality,” “Scottish thrift,” “Kansas is not a geographical location so much as a state of mind.” Neighborhood institutions like the church, the school, and the settlement are essentially cultural institutions, and recognition of this fact has far-reaching implications for the policies and programs of these local centers.