244 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



foundation to the whole subject. For in their examinations of human 

 communities and governments they have limited themselves to man, 

 and to large extent to man within the periods of graven and written 

 history. The chief criticism that biology presses on sociology is that 

 sociology has not yet taken the broad comparative and genetic method. 

 The physician has learned that to understand the human body he must 

 constantly make comparisons with the lower animals ; indeed, the prog- 

 ress of medicine, as we have seen, is due to such a method. The psy- 

 chologist is also recognizing that to explain human mental states he 

 must go back of man; must trace mind from its beginnings, for biolo- 

 gists have shown that even the simplest one-celled animals exhibit 

 memory, attention, volition as expressed by choice, and still other 

 mental states. But so far the sociologist appears to have missed this 

 method and has also failed to go back to the beginnings of the social 

 state. Would you say that it seems ridiculous to expect complex social 

 life among the lower animals ? Biology has made known animal com- 

 munities that in all respects are more fitted to their conditions of life 

 and more harmonious than ever was human society. Nearly all con- 

 ceivable social states are exhibited by animals. For there are associa- 

 tions of entirely different species of animals, even of animals with 

 plants, the condition known as symbiosis, where each is necessary to 

 the life of the other; this is a life partnership. There are quite oppo- 

 site kinds of social conditions, parasitism, where the one gets most of 

 the benefit and the other most of the injury; this animal parasite has 

 its resemblance to the human plutocrat. Again, there are associations 

 of individuals of the same species, societies that have developed out of 

 the maternal instinct, the instinct of the mother to care for her young ; 

 the social state has arisen in such cases by the mother remaining with 

 her young until the latter are full grown. The beginning of the family 

 we find in the mother fish who guards the young against the father, or 

 the spider who carries her young upon her back ; endless are the curious 

 instances of such single families. Out of these have arisen higher 

 social states by the young remaining together after maturing, held 

 together by the control of the mother. In the animals this is generally 

 a matriarchate, or at least a feminine rule, for among the lower animals 

 it is the males that have no suffrage. Thus has grown up that won- 

 derful socialism of the honey bee, admired by men since the beginning 

 of history. Here the queen mother is the single reproductive indi- 

 vidual, wherefore she is guarded and fed; but save for her annual out- 

 burst, a pettishness allowed to royalty, when she leads a swarm out of 

 the hive, she is virtually a prisoner and the government is carried out 

 by the workers, who regulate the life of their queen more precisely than 

 we are able to do by any written constitution, while at the same time 

 they gather all the food, pasteurize and store it, nurse the young, secrete 



