400 lotka: efficiency in organic evolution 



portion of our activities fall outside the scope thus circumscribed. 

 If we actually consider one by one our various activities of a 

 common working day, or for the matter of that of a holiday, we 

 find that, almost without exception, even the most trivial of 

 them are either bought or sold. My breakfast is bought at the 

 butcher's and grocer's. I pay rent for the privilege of sitting 

 at table in my dining room. I pay carfare to be conveyed from 

 my house to my office. Every hour spent at the office is paid 

 for in salary. At night there is again the item of carfare, food, 

 rent, amusements, etc. It is difficult or impossible to find an 

 action ever so trivial which has not a definite money value. 



2. A seemingly more serious limitation than the one just 

 considered might seem to lie in the fact that much of the argu- 

 ment presented has been sketched out on a background of exam- 

 ples taken from the special case of the human species. A well 

 developed economic system among living organisms is peculiar 

 to civilized man. It might therefore appear at first sight as if 

 arguments and conclusions involving economic concepts could 

 in no sense be applied to such organisms as those higher animals 

 which in their general habits and characteristics do more or 

 less resemble man. 



It must be admitted that in practise this restriction has a real 

 significance. But the difference between the actions of man 

 and those of some of the highly developed species of animals is 

 not so much that the one possesses a sense of values and the 

 others do not, as, that in the case of the one — man — we have in 

 market prices a definite and readily accessible standard of meas- 

 urement of the values attached by him to various commodities, 

 while in the case of the others — the animals — we have no such 

 readily accessible standard of measurement. To argue that 

 because we have at present no ready means of ascertaining the 

 value set by a given animal upon a given material of consump- 

 tion, therefore no such value exists, would be parallel to the 

 contention that because men were at one time unable to measure 

 the distance from the earth to the moon, therefore there was 

 no such distance. In the matter of the measurement of values 

 we have not yet reached the epoch where the means for meas- 



