Alongside of the problem of family organization, lay the other problem of the means of subsistence. Some men live wholly on the fruit of a tree; others eat corn, or milk, or monkeys, or their elderly relatives. And here again the evidence falls into two classes. There are customs in which the eating appears to us as a ritual act designed by those who observed or initiated it to secure some ultimately useful end: they frequently belong to the kind of acts which we class together as Sympathetic Magic. There are also customs in respect of food, which to us appear to have only an economic interest; or if they have wider interest at all, acquire it from another consideration. Current anthropology--French anthropology in particular--and our own economic surroundings combine to bring home to us keenly the thought that the way in which a people gets its daily bread, not to mention the previous question how it is to get anything to eat at all (except, perhaps, its own unemployables), has a direct and profound influence on its social structure. A late stage of Greek thought on this subject is represented by the section in the first book of the _Politics_ which classifies the principal βίοι which are open to mankind, and hints (though the subject is not pursued) that the Good Life will be pursued with a very different equipment of customs and institutions according as it is pursued by the pastoral nomad ‘farming his migratory field’, or by the miner, or by the merchant seaman. A little earlier in thought as well as in time comes the sketch in the _Republic_, a glimpse of the earlier Socrates who had dabbled in geography and improved the ‘inventions’ of Archelaus. The later Socrates, wise in his own failures, takes his pupils hurriedly past this avenue of inquiry into the structure of society; the disciples, for the credit of the Master’s originality, omit all allusion to Archelaus and his work. But the Milesian who began with Physics, and went on to show what nowadays we should call ‘the applicability of biological laws to Man’, cannot have been without weight in the political thought of his time; and it is again to Herodotus that we must turn for indications of the extent to which this inquiry was already being followed in Greece in the generation of Archelaus, and before it.