in its ceaseless struggle to live depends wholly upon the cooperation of its differentiated cell-units, now no longer equivalent in function to the all-powerful Amoeba, although each one must be kept alive until its task is done, or the whole association would have no place in nature.  Similarly in the higher insect community, the superadded duties to fellow-components are even clearer, for in the competition of colony with colony, involving terrific battles whose casualties may be numbered by thousands, the stronger wins; and strength depends upon the concerted efforts of all the members of the kingdom, that only collectively constitute a complete biological whole.  Mere self-protection demands altruistic conduct:  if the worker ceased to bring in food when its own hunger was satisfied, there would be no tribal stores for the stay-at-home queens and nurses; and if the soldier fled from the field of battle to save its own life, its act would be suicidal ultimately, for to the degree of one unit the defense of its non-military supporters would be weakened and they would be so much the less unprotected during their service for the soldiers and all others.  Furthermore, we must admit the reality of natural criteria of ethical values, established far below mankind in the scale of life.  In an ant-republic, laws are instinctively obeyed quite as implicitly as though they were intelligibly proclaimed to all of the emmet citizens.  Right is might when community battles with community, for right is that which is biologically favorable.  And what may be correct conduct on the part of the members of one species may be naturally wrong and evil in another case.  To kill the princesses in order to obviate the possibility of civil war seems advantageous and therefore right when the queen remains in the persistent colony of honeybees, ready to do her part the following spring; but it might result in disaster and evil in the case of the social wasps, where the community dies as such in the fall, and the continuity of the species from one year to another requires the production of many queens lest the severe conditions of the winter’s hibernation should kill all fertile females if only one or two were available.  The standards of conduct are simple indeed; and whether or not it may seem best to separate the processes of social and ethical evolution culminating in human phenomena, the fact remains that these processes begin with elements discovered by the biologist among organisms of the lower levels in the scale.

* * * * *

We come at length to the biological interpretation of human social evolution, in so far as this may be expounded in a simple and concise form.  The comparative method must be employed in order to discover the fundamental attributes of savage, barbarous, and civilized communities which seem to differ so considerably in their complexity of social structure, and in order also to show that such basic elements are like those of communities