Bromley, Kent, 1902.






CHAPTER I

MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS

Struggle for existence. Mutual Aid a law of Nature and chief factor
of progressive evolution. Invertebrates. Ants and Bees. Birds,
hunting and fishing associations. Sociability. Mutual protection
among small birds. Cranes, parrots.





The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of
evolution, introduced into science by Darwin and Wallace, has
permitted us to embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in
one single generalization, which soon became the very basis of
our philosophical, biological, and sociological speculations. An
immense variety of facts:--adaptations of function and
structure of organic beings to their surroundings; physiological
and anatomical evolution; intellectual progress, and moral
development itself, which we formerly used to explain by so many
different causes, were embodied by Darwin in one general