BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 



"Come out into the light of things; 

 Let Nature be your teacher." 



— W. Wordsworth. 



"In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the 

 suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He 

 is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we 

 see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, 

 then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then 

 sociology — but always the new field was grudged to the new 

 method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name 

 of science." — W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 

 War. 



THERE are many facile comparisons to be 

 drawn between the facts of biology and of 

 sociology. The most obvious is that between 

 a whole civilized community and one of the higher 

 animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old fable 

 in Menenius Agrippa's Tale of the Belly and the 

 Members in Coriolanus. With Darwin, and the 

 establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound 

 footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now 

 seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely 

 by analogies of his own mind's weaving, but by the 

 living bonds of genetic descent; and it was at once 

 perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto 

 been suspected might inhere in the comparisons be- 



69 



