on the part of the nervous and alimentary organs that they may be relieved of the tasks of circulation and respiration and the discharge of ash-wastes.  Therefore the cells which make up an insect and a man are more diverse, they have more varied interrelationships, and they are far more interdependent then in the case of the components of Hydra.  Yet all the many-celled organisms that we are so accustomed to regard as individuals are really communities, demonstrating the existence and partial antithesis of the great laws of egoism and altruism, which are traceable even down to Amoeba and its like.

So much has been made of the lower kinds of cell-associations because the mind of the layman is unconsciously imbued with the idea that human society is a new thing,—­an idea which we now see it is necessary to discard at the outset.  Indeed, the cell-association of the Hydra and insect type is a more compact and a more stable kind of community than any group of human individuals worked out by nature toward the present end of the whole scheme of evolution.  That is to say, the subordination of cell-interest to cell-group welfare, while it must not go so far as to render the unit incapable of doing its work, is sufficiently advanced to make uncontrolled individualism impossible.  Let any class of Hydra’s cells, such as the nerve or muscle network, assume to exercise a selfish preeminence or to conduct a “strike,” the other classes, like the feeding cells, would not be properly served and they would be unable in consequence to work efficiently for the strikers.  The immediate result would be suicidal, for the selfish nerve-class would inevitably suffer through the downfall of the whole social fabric.  It is a nicely adjusted equilibrium that is established, where the “equal rights” of all the diverse cells consist in freedom to play a special part in the life of the group, serving other individuals in return for their service.  The Golden Rule is a natural law as old as nature; for even in Hydra’s life, unconscious discharge of duties to the race, and hence to others, is obligatory.  And all these low types of organic associations evolved ages before the rules of human social order were vaguely recognized by the reflective self-consciousness of man, to be formulated as the science of ethics.

The evolution of the wonderfully varied societies found among insects begins with the solitary insect itself, just as this, viewed as a cell-community, originates from one-celled beginnings like Amoeba through progressive evolution in time.  The similarity between social insects and human associations is clearer than in the case of a comparison between an example from either group and a cell-community, because the higher forms lack the organic contact of the components which is so prominent a feature in the lower instance.  The social bonds are looser and they allow a freer play of the constituents; but nevertheless the same laws that control the activities of the cells making up what we now take as the individual element, command obedience on the part of the interrelated members of an insect community with equal strictness.