i6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



animal rivals, and command the life-supporting products of the 

 earth. These transcendent powers, by which the brute creation 

 had been subjugated, men soon turned against each other, and 

 the battle of life between man and man became as terrible as 

 that between man and beast. But, unlike the fierce predatory- 

 mammals and the antediluvian monsters over which he had tri- 

 umphed, the human animal soon ceased to carry on an isolated, 

 individual, effort of self-preservation. Out of the early sexual 

 association of mating, which he developed in common with 

 many other creatures, there sprang the family, the tribe, and 

 finally the nation. Co-operative organization was begun, from 

 which has grown what we call civilized life. 



The first grouping of many individuals into a tribe was the 

 birth into the world of a new organism. This new organism has 

 in the course of ages so grown, and developed, and difi^erentiated 

 in the complexity of its functions and structures, that it is rec- 

 ognized by modern philosophy ; and the dawning study of the 

 laws under which it lives constitutes the infant science of soci- 

 ology. 



We can not stop here to demonstriite this assertion, which 

 the advanced thought of to-day has accepted and which the 

 world at large is coming more and more to understand, that 

 society, like the individuals of which it is made up, is an organ- 

 ism living by constant adaptation to its environment. To those 

 who deny this, no inquiry into the main topic of our discussion 

 is possible. Assuming it, therefore, to be a necessary postulate 

 to all economic study, let us proceed to examine the character of 

 that organism at the earliest stage of its growth. 



The prehistoric human being, or unit with which the social 

 structure was built, must have been, from our nineteenth-cent- 

 ury standpoint, near akin to the brutes in the savageness of his 

 instincts. Bred to a life of peril and physical conflict, the 

 aggressive and predatory in his nature must have far exceeded 

 any germs of those gentler attributes at present thought to be 

 distinctively human, Now, as the nature of any whole must be 

 determined by the aggregate natures of its component parts, the 

 superorganic whole which the combination of these earlier indi- 

 viduals created must have displayed in a general way their com- 

 mon traits. In a word, the early tribe or germinal society was 

 an aggressive, predatory organism, striving to perpetuate itself 

 by the annihilation of all similar organisms with which it came 

 into competition. 



Why this fact is of importance to our discussion we can at 

 once show. If all organisms perpetuate themselves by the adap- 

 tation of their structures to the particular circumstances of their 

 lives, then a knowledge of these circumstances must be a key 



