Darwin's phrase “place in natural economy”, andSpencer's term “correspondence” can be regarded as first attempts to express the organism-environment relationships. The same concept has more recently been approached from the point of view of life-form, external activities, and habitat. Though all these points are interlocking, they have been stressed differently in the writings of American and European ecologists. It is proposed that the term “niche” would be most useful and rational if applied to the total of relationships between a living (...) organism and its complete environment, both biotic and abiotic. (shrink)