OUR SIX-FOOTED RIVALS. 199 



tion and, in like manner, e. g., a community of beavers or of rooks 

 is formed by the aggregation, not of single individuals, but of groups, 

 each consisting of a male, a female, and their offspring. The social 

 unit among vertebrates, therefore, is the family, whether permanent 

 or temporary, and whether monogamous or polygamous. In number- 

 less cases the family exists without combining with other families to 

 form a nation, but we greatly doubt if there exists a single case of a 

 vertebrate nation not formed of and resolvable into families. 



Among the Annulosa this is reversed. The family among them 

 scarcely exists at all. Rarely is the union of the male and the female 

 extended beyond the actual intercourse, all provision for the future 

 young devolving upon the latter alone. Among the rare exceptions 

 to this rule, we may mention the burying-beetle, and seme of the 

 dung-beetles, both sexes of whom labor conjointly to find and inter 

 the food in which the eggs are to be deposited. Generally speaking, 

 moreover, the young insect never knows never even sees its parents, 

 who in most cases have died before it has emerged from the egg. 

 Among non-social insects the earwig and a few other Orthoptera form 

 the chief exceptions. Where a regularly organized society, a nation, 

 or tribe, exists among annulose animals, it is not formed by the coa- 

 lescence of families to a higher unity. The family, if it can be said to 

 exist at all, is conterminous and identical w T ith the nation. This ab- 

 sence of a something whose claims are felt by all ordinary men to be 

 stronger than those of the state has rendered the successful organiza- 

 tion of the " commune" feasible among ants, and among other social 

 Hymenoptera, such as bees, wasps, etc. With them the state has no 

 rival, and absorbs all the energies which in human society the indi- 

 vidual devotes to the interests of his family. We thus see that the- 

 orists on social reform have been, from their own point of view, logi- 

 cally consistent in attacking the institution of marriage and the whole 

 system of domestic life : they have sought to abolish the great im- 

 pediment to the commune, and to approximate man to the condition 

 of our six-footed rivals, and to constitute society not as heretofore of 

 molecules, but of atoms. 



But it is not enough to show that the failure of communism among 

 mankind and its success among certain Hymenopterous insects are 

 due to the existence and the power of the family in the former case, 

 and to its absence in the latter. We have yet to inquire into the 

 wherefore of so important a distinction. Vertebrate society, where it 

 exists at all, is founded on family life, because every vertebrate animal 

 is sexual, and as such is attracted to some individual of the opposite 

 sex by the strongest instinct of its nature, that of self-preservation 

 alone excepted. Invertebrate society, where it exists in perfection, as 

 among the Hymenoptera, is not formed by a union of families, because 

 the great majority of Hymenopterous individuals (in the social species) 

 are non-sexual, neuter, incapable of any private or domestic attach- 



