21 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



tain-regions, marshes or mud-islands, and jungles, men of different 

 races have developed political heads of this compound kind. And, on 

 observing that the localities, otherwise so unlike, are alike as being 

 severally made up of parts difficult of access, we can not question that 

 to this is mainly due the governmental form under which their in- 

 habitants unite. 



Besides the compound headships which are thus indigenous in 

 places favoring them, there are other compound headships \vhich arise 

 after the break-up of preceding political organizations. Especially 

 apt are they so to arise where the people, not scattered through a wdde 

 district but concentrated in a town, can assemble bodily. Control of 

 every kind having disappeared, it happens in such cases that the aggre- 

 gate will has free play, and there establishes itself for a time that 

 relatively popular form with which all government begins ; but, regu- 

 larly or ii'regularly, a superior few become differentiated from the 

 many, and of predominant men some one is made, directly or indi- 

 rectly, most predominant. 



Compound headships habitually become, in course of time, either 

 narrower or wider. They are narrowed by militancy, which tends 

 ever to concentrate directive power in fewer hands, and, if continued, 

 almost certainly changes them into simple headships. Conversely, 

 they are widened by industrialism. This, by gathering together aliens 

 detached from the restraints imposed by patriarchal, feudal, or other 

 such organizations, by increasing the number of those to be coerced 

 in comparison with the number of those who have to coerce them, by 

 placing this larger number in conditions favoring concerted action, 

 by s^ibstituting for daily enforced obedience the daily fulfillment of 

 voluntary obligations and daily maintenance of claims, tends ever 

 toward equalization of citizenship. 



* 



DEGENEEATION. 



By Dr. ANDKEW WILSON. 



IT can not be gainsaid that a survey of the fields of life around us 

 imi)resses one with the idea that the general tendencies of living 

 nature gravitate toward progression and improvement, and are mod- 

 eled on lines which, as Von Baer long ago remarked, lead from the 

 general or simple toward the definite special and complex. This much 

 is admitted on all hands, and the ordinary courses of life substantiate 

 the aphorism that progress from low grades and humble ways is the 

 law of the organic universe that hems us in on every side, and of which, 

 indeed, we ourselves form part. The growth of plant-life, which runs 

 concurrently with the changing seasons of the year, impresses this 



