An Outline of the Relations of Animals to Their Inland Environments

As creatures of habit, the attitude of mind with which we approach a scientific problem has much influence upon what we see in it or get from it. Although the essence of life is activity - the response of the changing organism to its changing environment - yet this dynamic conception of animal relations, and all that it implies, has not become as prevalent a mental habit among biologists as one might expect. While some naturalists view the animal from a more or less dynamic standpoint, they do not include a similar conception of the relation of an animal to its environment. Still others view the environment more or less dynamically but do not extend this conception to the animal and thus both of these conceptions lack completeness and are not thoroughgoing and consistent. The study of activities, or in other words the study of processes, has made great progress in the allied sciences, much to their advantage, and undoubtedly the prevalence of similar conceptions will lead to similar advances in biology.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe