BIO-DYNAMICS 91 



manages somehow to produce the necessary purchase considera- 

 tion, which involves biological co-operation and concomitant 

 degrees of general physiological efficiency and integrity. 



Once more it becomes clear that no genuine advancement 

 can take place without all parts concerned performing to the 

 fullest the duties which have devolved upon them, and which 

 they are best qualified to perform. The very fact that the more 

 complex the organisation, the more costly the expenditure 

 required to achieve progress, also shows that the higher the 

 organism stands in the scale of evolution, the more pronounced 

 becomes the need of general restraint incumbent upon it 

 the truth of the physiological application of the aphorism 

 "noblesse oblige" is once more shown. 



How narrowly Spencer missed Bio-Economics will be seen 

 from the following analogy that he draws between adaptive 

 modifications in organisms on the one hand, and in human 

 societies on the other: 



We have before found our conceptions of vital processes made clearer 

 by studying analogous social processes. In societies there is a mutual 

 dependence of functions essentially like that which exists in organisms, 

 and there is also an essentially like reaction of function on structures. 

 From the laws of adaptive modification in societies we may therefore 

 hope to get a clue to the laws of adaptive modification in organisms. 

 Let us suppose, then, that a society has arrived at a state of equilibrium 

 like that of a mature animal a state not like our own in which growth 

 and structural development are rapidly going on, but a state of settled 

 balance among the functional powers of the various classes and industrial 

 bodies and a consequent fixity in the relative sizes of such classes and 

 bodies. Further, let us suppose that in a society thus balanced, there 

 occurs something which throws an unusual demand on some one industry 

 say, an unusual demand for ships (which we will assume to be built 

 of iron) in consequence of a competing mercantile nation having been 

 prostrated by famine or pestilence. The immediate result of this addi- 

 tional demand for iron ships is the employment of more workmen and 

 the purchase of more iron by the ship-builders, and when, presently, 

 the demand continuing, the builders find their premises and machinery 

 insufficient, they enlarge them. If the extra requirement persists, the 

 high interest and high wages bring such extra capital and labour into 

 the business as are needed for new ship-building establishments. But 

 such extra capital and labour do not come quickly, since, in a balanced 



