THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM 309 
form colonies in which the persons are primarily nutritive and 
acquire fixed and definite spatial relations to one another, whereas 
the more specialized animals, like the social insects, may constitute 
families of mobile persons with reproduction as the ‘Leitmotiv’ 
of their consociation. In man we have families associating to form 
still more complex aggregates, the true societies. Other compre- 
hensive organisms are the coenobioses, or more or less definite 
consociations of animals and plants of different species, which the 
ecologists are endeavoring to analyze. Finally we have philos- 
ophers, like Fechner, stepping in with the assertion, that the earth 
as a whole is merely a great organism, that the planetary systems 
in turn are colonies of earths and suns and that the universe it- 
self is to be regarded as one stupendous organism. Thus starting 
with the biophore as the smallest and ending with the universe as 
the most comprehensive we have a sufficiently magnificent hier- 
archy of organisms to satisfy even the most zealous panpsychist. 
As biologists we may, for present purposes, lop off and discard the 
ends of this series of organisms, the biophores as being purely 
hypothetical and the cosmos as involving too many ultrabiological 
assumptions. We then have left the following series: first, the 
Protozoon or Protophyte, second the simple or non-metameric 
person, third the metameric person, fourth the colony of the 
nutritive type, fifth the family, or colony of the reproductive type, 
sixth the coenobiose, and seventh the true, or human society. 
Closer inspection shows that these are sufficiently heterogeneous 
when compared with one another and with the personal organism, 
which is the prototype of the series, but I believe, nevertheless that 
all of them are real organisms and not merely conceptual construc- 
tions or analogies. One of them, the insect colony, has interested 
me exceedingly, and as I have repeatedly found its treatment as 
an organism to yield fruitful results in my studies, I have acquired 
the conviction that our biological theories must remain inade- 
quate so long as we confine ourselves to the study of the cells and 
persons and leave the psychologists, sociologists and metaphy- 
sicians to deal with the more complex organisms. Indeed our 
failure to codperate with these investigators in the study of ani- 
mal and plant societies has blinded us to many aspects of the 
