Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/338

326 or bee doing anything for itself alone, or performing any act which is not intended for the good of the community as a whole. Selfishness, so far as the home community is concerned, seems to have vanished, and labor and life are freely given for the good of this great whole, with no evident display of any thought of individual comfort or aggrandizement.

The communities of termites are communal in an equally complete sense, and seem to have utterly lost the selfish sentiment which is the ruling agency with solitary animals. With the beavers communalism has stopped somewhat short of this complete stage. They possess their dams and canals in common, and labor together in all the needs of out-door life. But they have not advanced to the stage of a common home, their habits rendering this impossible, or nearly so; and, though they seek food in common, each lodge lays up its own private stores. Yet their interests are so largely in common that they stand distinctly separate in this respect from the ordinary social vertebrates, and fairly belong to the communal class, in company with their insect analogues.

There is one further interesting and suggestive feature in these communal groups of animals, whose significance will be apparent when we come to consider the conditions of human communities. This is that they are family aggregates. The indefinite association of the social animals has become a strictly family association in the communal animals. This is not very clearly displayed in the beavers. Yet with them the inmates of each lodge probably belong to a single family, and form a group within the larger group. And the community as a whole may be descended from a single ancestor, like the members of the patriarchal family among men.

With the ants, bees, and termites this family association has gone much further, and each community constitutes a single family. Division of labor has proceeded to such an extent that the egg-bearing function is confined to one or a few members of the community, while all the sexual individuals beyond these perish. This principle has gone farthest with the bees, who permit but one female to develop for the use of each swarm, and who mercilessly destroy all the males, as soon as they become a burden on the community.

Thus it is evident that the conditions of communal life among animals can not fairly be claimed as merely advanced instances of socialism. They differ not only in regard to degree of community of interests, but also in displaying a new and distinct principle of association. The social group is a vague one, the communal a strictly defined one, which has gradually grown up in the midst of the older group and finally replaced it. Alike in ants, bees, and rodents, species exist in various stages of association, between the solitary and the communal, and could we trace all the steps of development we should undoubtedly perceive solitary animals gradually adopting social