sense organs, taken together with the
collateral evidences of sense action, as early as Cambrian times,
furnish the groundwork for a historical study of the progress of
sentient life, eventuating in the higher forms of mental life. Here
the problems of geology run hand in hand with the problems of
psychology. The limitations of the evidence bearing on psychological
phenomena, while regrettable, are not without some compensation in
that they center the attention on the simpler aspects of the
protracted deployment of the psychological functions.

In addition to the clear evidences of psychic action, in at least its
elementary forms, there appeared early in the stratigraphic records
intimations of some of the relationships that sentient beings then
bore to one another; and this relationship gives occasion to study the
primitive aspects of sociological phenomena. If nothing more is
learned than the important lesson that sociology is not a thing of
today, not an untried realm inviting all kinds of ill-digested
projects, but on the contrary is a field of vast and instructive
history, the gain will not be inconsiderable. There are intimations of
the early existence and effective activity of those affections that
precede and that cluster about the parental relationship, the nucleus
of the most vital of all the sociological relationships. In contrast
to the affections, there are distinct evidences of antagonistic
relations, of pursuit and capture, of attack and defense; there were
tools of warfare and devices for protection. In time, a wide-ranging
series of experiments, so to speak, were tried to secure advantage, to
avoid suffering, to escape death, and to preserve the species. There
were even suggestions of the cruder forms of government. The many
stages in the evolution of the various devices, as well as the stages
of their abandonment, that followed one another in the course of the
ages recorded the results of a multitude of efforts at sociological
adjustment. They raise the question whether a common set of guiding
principles does not underlie all such relationships, earlier and
later, whatever their rank in our scale of valuation. And so this
great field of inquiry--too narrowly regarded as merely
humanistic--comes into view early in the history of the earth. The
geological and the sociological sciences find in it common working
ground. If the geologic and the humanistic sciences are given each
their widest interpretatio