Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/277

Rh An instructive analogy between social organisms and individual organisms supports this inference. In a passage from which I have already quoted a clause, Sir Henry Maine, using a metaphor which biology furnishes, says: "All the branches of human society may or may not have been developed from joint families which arose out of an original patriarchal cell; but, wherever the joint family is an institution of an AyranAryan [sic] race, we see it springing from such a cell, and, when it dissolves, we see it dissolving into a number of such cells:" thus implying that, as the cell is the proximate component of the individual organism, so the family is the proximate component of the social organism. But in either case this, though generally true, is not entirely true; and the qualification required is extremely suggestive. Low down in the animal kingdom exist creatures not possessing the definite cell-structure—small portions of living protoplasm without limiting membranes, and even without nuclei. There are also certain types produced by aggregation of such Protozoa; and, though it is now alleged that the individual components of one of these compound Foraminifera have nuclei, yet they have none of the definiteness of developed cells. In types above these, however, it is otherwise: every cœlenterate, molluscous, annidose, or vertebrate animal begins as a cluster of distinct, nucleated cells. Whence it would seem that the unorganized portion of protoplasm constituting the lowest animal cannot, by union with others such, furnish the basis for a higher animal; and that the simplest aggregates have to become definitely developed before they can form larger aggregates capable of much development. Similarly with societies. The tribes in which the family is vague and unsettled remain politically unorganized. Sundry partially-civilized peoples characterized by some definiteness and coherence of family structure have attained corresponding heights of social structure. And the highest organizations have been reached by nations compounded out of family groups which had previously become highly organized.

And now, limiting our attention to these highest societies, we have to thank Sir Henry Maine for showing us the ways in which many of their ideas, customs, laws, and arrangements, have been derived from those which characterized the patriarchal group.

In all cases, habits of life, when continued for many generations, mould the nature; and the resulting traditional beliefs and usages, with the accompanying sentiments, become difficult to change. Hence, on passing from the wandering pastoral life to the settled agricultural life, the patriarchal type of family, with its established traits, persisted, and gave its stamp to the social structures which gradually arose. As Sir Henry Maine says: "All the larger groups which make up the primitive societies in which the patriarchal family occurs, are seen to be multiplications of it, and to be, in fact,