To Professor Alfred Espinas[115] we owe the best and fullest discussion of the social life of animals, and to his work the reader may be referred for a careful and, for the most part, unstrained and unbiassed consideration of the phenomena. In common with others who have devoted serious attention to the subject, he sees in the family the starting-point of the higher and more comprehensive social group, or “peuplade.” Prince Kropotkine seems, indeed, to combat this view; but the divergence of opinion is more apparent than real. He tells us[116] that anthropology “has established beyond any doubt that mankind did _not_ begin its life in the shape of small isolated families. Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human evolution.... Societies, bands, or tribes--not families--were thus the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.” And in support of his views he adduces the sexual communism which is said to be found in the lowest savages, and briefly traces the development of monogamy and the genesis of the family ideal as we conceive it. It may at once be admitted that in all probability mankind did not have its origin in small isolated families. If we do not admit this we must accept the alternative hypothesis, that man was developed from an unsocial ancestor. For though the biological family is the starting-point of the community, it does not of course follow that wherever there is so much coherence between parents and offspring as to form a temporary family group, a social community must in due course arise. In such unsocial carnivora as the tiger, the temporary linkage of family life is strong while it lasts. But though mankind presumably originated in a prehuman race that had already reached some degree of social coherence, there remains behind the question--what was the origin of this social group? And to this question, Prince Kropotkine, in common with Darwin and Espinas, would probably answer without hesitation, that the primeval germ of the social community lay in the prolonged coherence of the group of parents and offspring. In the unsocial animals the family separates and disintegrates before the offspring mate. But if the family continue to cohere, the mating of offspring will give rise to the continuity of coherence found in the herd, or troop, or tribe. For new family groups will be constantly arising before the old family groups have ceased to be associated. Thus would be afforded more opportunity for tradition than among the unsocial animals.