ed it is possible to work out a rational classification of
social groups.

Espinas defines society in terms of corporate action. Wherever separate
individuals act together as a unit, where they co-operate as though they
were parts of the same organism, there he finds society. Society from
this standpoint is not confined to members of one species, but may be
composed of different members of species where there is permanent joint
activity. In the study of symbiosis among animals, it is significant to
note the presence of structural adaptations in one or both species. In
the taming and domestication of animals by man the effects of symbiosis
are manifest. Domestication, by the selection in breeding of traits
desired by man, changes the original nature of the animal. Taming is
achieved by control of habits in transferring to man the filial and
gregarious responses of the young naturally given to its parents and
members of its kind. Man may be thought of as domesticated through
natural social selection. Eugenics is a conscious program of further
domestication by the elimination of defective physical and mental racial
traits and by the improvement of the racial stock through the social
selection of superior traits. Taming has always been a function of human
society, but it is dignified by such denominations as "education,"
"social control," "punishment," and "reformation."

The plant community offers the simplest and least qualified example of
the community. Plant life, in fact, offers an illustration of a
_community_ which is _not a society_. It is not a society because it is
an organization of individuals whose relations, if not wholly external,
are, at any rate, "unsocial" in so far as there is no consensus. The
plant community is interesting, moreover, because it exhibits in the
barest abstraction, the character of _competitive co-operation_, the
aspect of social life which constitutes part of the special
subject-matter of economic science.

This struggle for existence, in some form or other, is in fact essential
to the existence of society. Competition, segregation, and accommodation
serve to maintain the social distances, to fix the status, and preserve
the independence of the individual in the social relation. A society in
which all distances, physical as well as psychical, had been abolished,
in which there was neither taboo, prejudice, nor reserve of any sort; a
society in which the intimacies were absolute, would