The rapid, even “revolutionary,” emergence of self-conscious ecology from the amorphous body of classical natural history and the overshadowing presence of experimental laboratory-based physiology, which was the dominant aspect of late 19th century biology, is a remarkable, and poorly studied, phase in the history of biology (Frey 1963a; Coleman 1977; Egerton 1976; Lowe 1976; Mclntosh 1976, 1983a; Cox 1979; Cittadino 1980, 1981; Tobey 1981). Oscar Drude, an eminent German plant geographer and a major influence on the development of plant ecology in America, aptly described the sudden recognition of ecology at the Congress of Arts and Sciences meeting at the Universal Exposition in St. Louis in 1904:

In spite of the fact that ecology was coined in 1866 and had been, unnoticed, in the literature since then, it was, as Drude stated, essentially unknown in 1890.

Whatever may be said of the origins of ecology in the Greek science of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, or in 18th-century natural history as exemplified by Linnaeus and Buffon, or even in Darwinian evolutionary biology, its rise as a named and “self-conscious” discipline with its own practitioners was essentially in the last decade of the 19th century (Allee et al. 1949). Ecologists began to define ecology by doing it and recognizing that they were doing it.