THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM 32a 
tive organismal type of the colony, as compared with that of the 
person, should enable us to follow the process of consociation and 
the resulting physiological division of labor moresuccessfully. In 
the problem, as thus conceived, we must include, not only the 
true colony and society, and the innumerable cases of symbiosis, 
parasitism and ccenobiosis, but also the consociation and mutual 
modification of hereditary tendencies in parthenogenetic and 
biparental plants and animals, since in all of these phenomena our 
attention is arrested not so much by the struggle for existence, 
which used to be painted in such lurid colors, as by the ability 
of the organism to temporize and compromise with other organ- 
isms, to inhibit certain activities of the aequipotential unit in the 
interests of the unit itself and of other organisms; in a word, to 
secure survival through a kind of egoistic altruism.’ 
2Since this paragraph was written I have found that several recent authors 
have given more explicit expression to a very similar conception to the réle of 
cooperation and struggle in the development of organisms. Especially worthy 
of mention in this connection are Kammerer (Allgemeine Symbiose und Kampf 
ums Dasein als gleichberechtigte Triebkraifte der Evolution. Arch. f. Rass. u. 
Ges.-Biol.6, 1909, pp. 585-608), Schiefferdecker (Symbiose. Sitzb. niederrhein. 
Ges. f. Natur. u. Heilk. zu Bonn, 18, Juni, 1904, 11 pp.), Bolsche (Daseinskampf 
und gegenseitige Hilfe in der Entwicklung. Kosmos, 6,'1909); and Kropotkin 
(Mutual aid, a factor of evolution, London, 1902). 
