COMMUNITY ANALYSIS 31 



community we could understand if our information 

 were limited to that which is available for human 

 students of the community relations of non- 

 human animals. 



Everyone has a considerable amount of in- 

 formation concerning the needs, the inter-rela- 

 tions and the tolerations of man. Even with this 

 interesting animal species, I suspect that many of 

 the things we think we know are not true, but our 

 personal and collective store of knowledge about 

 man and his relations to the animals about him is 

 greater than that for any other animal. Against 

 this background of knowledge we can test the 

 limitations of our best methods of investigating 

 the inter-relations of other animals. The ques- 

 tion we are asking is: how much would we know 

 about human affairs if our information were 

 limited to that which modern methods of studying 

 animal communities would reveal? 



The number of animal species is appalling and 

 no one person can be expected to be able to rec- 

 ognize all that are to be found in an ordinary 

 animal community in nature. In the Chicago 

 area, for example, there are more species of beetles, 

 or of flies, or of ants, bees and wasps, or of butter- 

 flies and moths, than there are of flowering plants, 

 and most of the different species are more difficult 

 to recognize than are even the various sorts of 



