CHAPTER II 



FEATURES COMMON TO MAN AND THE 



LOWER ANIMALS 



THE existence in man, in the insects, in the birds, 

 and in the rodents of so many strikingly similar 

 mental traits which are conspicuously absent in 

 the monkeys and in nearly all the other mammals 

 must have some significance. There must be some 

 underlying basic reason for this curious distribution 

 of corresponding mental attributes. What have 

 these various groups in common wherein they differ 

 from the other creatures inhabiting the land? Can 

 such diverse types of living things have anything in 

 common? 



Among the insects man-like mental attributes are 

 almost exclusively confined to types in which the 

 young are very different from the adults, either soft, 

 delicate and apparently headless grubs as in the case of 

 the ants, bees, and social, parasitic and predacious 

 wasps — the mud-daubers, digger wasps and others — 

 or soft bodied worm-like things as the young of 

 caddis-flies and the caterpillars of small and feeble 

 moths and butterflies. But they also occur in the 

 white-ants or termites, which are weak and feeble in 

 all stages, and in a few other types. What may be 

 considered as the clothing of the insect body — the 

 construction about it of a more or less dense cocoon 

 of silk, of itself alone or used as a binder for other sub- 



