Cylchgronau Cymru

The Study of Living Things One of the five field centres set up by the Field Studies Council for the study of the living organism in its own environment is at Dale Fort, at the entrance to Milford Haven. The work of the Dale Fort Field Centre is here de- scribed by its Warden, J H Barrett, MA. J H BARRETT pERHAPS the greatest contributions to biology by the nineteenth century naturalists were by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and by all those workers who devoted their lives to listing and organizing within the system outlined by Linnaeus the various major groups of plants and animals. Now, in the present century, the listing is largely over. Some biologists have turned to the study of the cell, some to the mechanics of inheritance; others are enquiring into the behaviour of animals and into their aggregation with other plants and animals into natural communities. Darwin and Wallace based their famous papers on work done in the field; Linnaeus employed many to collect for him in all parts of the world. A substantial and important emphasis in modern biology has come round again to the study of the living organism, undisturbed in its own environment, with all the forces of nature acting upon it. For the time being moon probes and atomic power stations loom larger in the public's imagination than the more fundamental problems of world health and perhaps eventually world starvation. Workers on the frontier between medicine and entomology, those developing a wheat or a rice that ripens where none ripened before, those improving grasslands, those investigating the food potential of the oceans, have all been trained in the field as well as in the laboratory and museum; their work is out-of-doors, their laboratory is the countryside. Most biologists today can no more count themselves qualified without field experience than a doctor can whose only knowledge of man has come from dead bodies. Opportunities for this field training hardly existed before 1945. School biology sixth forms did not venture beyond the annual cycle of class-room dissections; students in but few university departments knew anything of animals except from the picklejar or museum shelf.