GENESIS, HEREDITY, AND VARIATION. 3G3 



in 187G, will be found elaborated in detail that analogy be- 

 tween individual organization and social organization which 

 was briefly sketched out in an essay on "The Social Organism" 

 published in 1860. In §§ 241-3 a parallel is drawn between 

 the developments of the sustaining systems of the two; and 

 it is pointed out how, in the one case as in the other, the com- 

 ponents — here organic units and there citizens — have their 

 activities and arrangements- mainly settled by local conditions. 

 One leading example is that the parts constituting the alimen- 

 tary canal, while jointly fitted to the nature of the food, are 

 severally adapted to the successive stages at which the food 

 arrives in its progress; and that in an analogous way the 

 industries carried on by peoples forming different parts of a 

 society, are primarily determined by the natures of things 

 around — agriculture, pastoral and arable, special manufactures 

 and minings, ship-building and fishing : the respective groups 

 falling into fit combinations and becoming partially modified 

 to suit their work. The implication is that while the organ- 

 ization of a society as a whole depends on the characters of 

 its units, in such way that by some types of men despotisms 

 are always evolved while by other types there are evolved 

 forms of government partially free — forms which repeat 

 themselves in colonies — there is, on the other hand, in every 

 case a local power of developing appropriate structures. And 

 it might have been pointed out that similarly in types of 

 creatures not showing much consolidation, as the Annelida, 

 many of the component divisions, largely independent in 

 their vitalities, are but little affected in their structures bv 

 the entire aggregate. 



My purpose at that time being the elucidation of socio- 

 logical truths, it did not concern me to carry further the 

 biological half of this comparison. Otherwise there might 

 have been named the case in which a supernumerary finger, 

 beginning to bud out, completes itself as a local organ with 

 bones, muscles, skin, nail, etc., in defiance of central control : 

 even repeating itself when cut off. There might also have 



