Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/248

244 foundation to the whole subject. For in their examinations of human communities and governments they have limited themselves to man, and to large extent to man within the periods of graven and written history. The chief criticism that biology presses on sociology is that sociology has not yet taken the broad comparative and genetic method. The physician has learned that to understand the human body he must constantly make comparisons with the lower animals; indeed, the progress of medicine, as we have seen, is due to such a method. The psychologist is also recognizing that to explain human mental states he must go back of man; must trace mind from its beginnings, for biologists have shown that even the simplest one-celled animals exhibit memory, attention, volition as expressed by choice, and still other mental states. But so far the sociologist appears to have missed this method and has also failed to go back to the beginnings of the social state. Would you say that it seems ridiculous to expect complex social life among the lower animals? Biology has made known animal communities that in all respects are more fitted to their conditions of life and more harmonious than ever was human society. Nearly all conceivable social states are exhibited by animals. For there are associations of entirely different species of animals, even of animals with plants, the condition known as symbiosis, where each is necessary to the life of the other; this is a life partnership. There are quite opposite kinds of social conditions, parasitism, where the one gets most of the benefit and the other most of the injury; this animal parasite has its resemblance to the human plutocrat. Again, there are associations of individuals of the same species, societies that have developed out of the maternal instinct, the instinct of the mother to care for her young; the social state has arisen in such cases by the mother remaining with her young until the latter are full grown. The beginning of the family we find in the mother fish who guards the young against the father, or the spider who carries her young upon her back; endless are the curious instances of such single families. Out of these have arisen higher social states by the young remaining together after maturing, held together by the control of the mother. In the animals this is generally a matriarchate, or at least a feminine rule, for among the lower animals it is the males that have no suffrage. Thus has grown up that wonderful socialism of the honey bee, admired by men since the beginning of history. Here the queen mother is the single reproductive individual, wherefore she is guarded and fed; but save for her annual outburst, a pettishness allowed to royalty, when she leads a swarm out of the hive, she is virtually a prisoner and the government is carried out by the workers, who regulate the life of their queen more precisely than we are able to do by any written constitution, while at the same time they gather all the food, pasteurize and store it, nurse the young, secrete