WOODS AND TREES—KRECKER 313 
In saying this, I am mindful of those who maintain that social 
organization is not comparable to corporate organization. I am in- 
clined to think the difference is not so much a matter of principle 
as of means. In the one case the constituent units have been held to- 
gether by bonds of physical contact, in the other they have been as 
firmly held by the influence of distance receptors. Emerson,® the 
ecologist, has recently expressed the view that, “Regardless of how 
one interprets the unity of the more complex human societies, the 
human family, and other family systems, are real cooperative, supra- 
organismic entities. * * * Society is merely a manifestation of 
fundamental life attributes which are shared with other biological 
systems (e. g., multicellular organisms) and the division between the 
social and the non-social is not sharp.” Jennings® goes further and 
points out that there is much to be said in favor of the conclusion 
that “mankind is a single great organism temporarily divided into 
pieces—the individuals.” Through this device the essential benefits 
of physical union are retained and become enriched by the advantages 
to be derived from mobile units. The study of organic evolution is, 
indeed, from one standpoint essentially a study in populations. 
Much can be said in support of the conclusion emerging from such 
a study, that in its animal phases at least unitary masses of proto- 
‘plasm, whether these units be cells or bodies, under similar conditions 
follow essentially similar principles of group organization. 
The social organization of the corporate population has, as you 
know, followed along two lines, the one illustrated by certain insects, 
the other by man. Among insects the culmination is reached by the 
ants and the termites, those individually defenseless creatures and 
toothsome morsels for many a foe which have through cooperation 
lived from the Tropics to the borders of the Arctic. 
Our own social structure is an even more intricate and widespread 
culmination of increasingly interdependent component units the 
progress of which has followed one unswerving path marked by the 
milestones of free cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, compound 
organisms, then families, tribes, kingdoms, empires, major alliances, 
and still it holds its course into the future. Faintly outlined as yet 
but apparently on our course lies some type of world union. This 
last prophecy may be branded an ultra-utopian fancy, but it must 
not be thought that the pyramiding of units I have just traced, 
whether in the field of physical union or sociopolitical associations, 
came without a struggle, without false starts that led up blind alleys 
or ended in stark failure. 
8 A. KE. Emerson, Denison Univ. Bull., December 1941. 
® Journ. Soc. Philos., January 1937. 
