CHAPTER I 

 THE ANIMAL COMMUNITY 



A 



NiMALS live in com- 

 munities. No living thing, plant or animal, is 

 solitary; animals especially are knit together by 

 many ties. Even the most solitary of the sexual 

 animals must meet in intimate union with another 

 member of its species though it perishes as a 

 result. Among animals that reproduce asexually 

 there are distinct evidences of social life, which 

 are particularly obvious in the case of colonial 

 animals that remain throughout life physically 

 attached to each other; frequently these forms 

 have such direct communication from one to 

 another that food eaten by any one may be shared 

 by many. Social life is not an incident or an 

 accident among animals; it is not the special 

 privilege of some few that stand high in the evolu- 

 tionary scale such as men, deer, birds, bees and 

 ants, but it is a normal constant, universal fact. 

 So in effect wrote the Frenchman, Espinas, over 

 fifty years ago. 



More recently Wheeler, the American student 

 of social insects, has seconded him with: "Most 



