676 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" The fact referred to in § 292, that even intelligent animals 

 display a sense of proprietorship, negatives the belief propounded 

 by some, that individual property was not recognized by primitive 

 men. When we see the claim of exclusive possession understood 

 by a dog, so that he fights in defense of his master's clothes if left 

 in charge of them, it becomes impossible to suppose that even in 

 their lowest state men were devoid of those ideas and emotions 

 which initiate private ownership. All that may be fairly as- 

 sumed is that these ideas and sentiments were at first less devel- 

 oped than they have since become." 



And again (section 541), Mr. Spencer says : 



" The desire to appropriate, and to keep that which has been 

 appropriated, lies deep, not in human nature only, but in animal 

 nature : being, indeed, a condition to survival." 



Nevertheless, individual ownership does not prevail among the 

 social insects, and yet their industry and frugality have been, 

 even from Bible times, held up as a lesson for man. " Go to the 

 ant, thou sluggard," and learn among other things that animals, 

 unlike men, may be aroused to intense and untiring activity and 

 close frugality by purely social instincts, their own sustenance 

 being swallowed up in social sustenance. 



In the following passage from the same section, Mr. Spencer 

 reaches, only to drop it, the point insisted on by Mr. Leslie : 



" The consciousness that conflict, and consequent injury, may 

 probably result from the endeavor to take that which is held by 

 another, ever tends to establish and strengthen the custom of 

 leaving each in possession of whatever he has obtained by labor ; 

 and this custom takes among primitive men the shape of an 

 overtly-admitted claim." 



Perhaps this explains also the custom of leaving each in pos- 

 session of what he obtains without labor. At any rate, the claim 

 to ownership comes to be admitted, and then only is it ownership 

 or property, whether founded on participation in production or, 

 as Lieber (" Property and Labor ") insists, on appropriation or 

 what not. 



Prof. Joseph Le Oonte has suggested that the custom of deducing the relative 

 mortality from different diseases by comparison with the total mortality, instead 

 of the number of persons still living, is liable to lead to erroneous conclusions. 

 Even estimates of general mortality by comparing the total annual deaths with 

 the number of persons at all ages may mislead. Thus the apparent low rate of 

 mortality in San Francisco as compared with Eastern cities arises from the abnor- 

 mal proportion of adults to children there, and not from general conditions unusu- 

 ally favorable to health. The true coefficient of mortality from cholera infantum 

 is expressed by the ratio of the number of deaths from the disease to the number 

 of persons liable to be attacked by it — or to the number of children under three 

 years of age. 



