ncerned
with social questions; never before has there been so much world-wide
discussion of topics in this field. And while it is true that much good
may be accomplished in utter ignorance of the past history of human
institutions and of the underlying principles which control the varied
types of organic associations, surely enlightened efforts will be more
effective for good. Therefore every member of a community who is capable
of thinking straight rests under an obligation imposed by nature to learn
how he is related to his fellow-men; he must act in concert with them or
else he forfeits his rights as a social unit. And it is his clear duty to
search among the results of science for aid in ascertaining what he ought
to do, and what reasons are given by evolution for the nature of his vital
duties.

Despite the growing appreciation of the fundamental relation between
biology and sociology, it is still far from universal. That the latter
science is in a sense a division of the former is more often recognized by
the biologist than by the average well-informed student of human social
phenomena. The layman in sociology too often concerns himself solely with
the complexities of the human problems, and he remains unaware of the
manifold products in the way of communal organisms far lower in the scale
of life firmly established as primitive biological associations ages
before the first human beings so advanced in mental stature that tribal
unions were found good. Among insects especially the biologist finds many
types of organized living things, ranging widely from the solitary
individual--a counterpart of something even more primitive than the most
unsocial savage now existing--up to communities that rival human
civilization, as regards the concerted effect of the diversified lives of
the component units. The student of the whole of living nature is favored
still more in that he learns how the make-up of such a simple organism as
a jellyfish displays principles underlying the structure of the whole and
the interplay of the parts that are identical with principles of
organization everywhere else. And all of these things can be dealt with in
a purely impersonal way which is impossible when attention is restricted
to the human case alone. Thus it becomes the biologist's privilege and his
duty as well to place his findings before those who wish to understand the
constitution of human society in order that evils may be lessened an