Man too enjoys to omphaloscopize. Himself as Navel of the Universe Oft rivets him--until he asks his Nurse, Old Nature, for the truth; and she replies: “Look back, and find support; you march with Life’s main stream. Look on--be proud; her future lies within your dream.” LONDON, _Feb. 1923_. BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY “Come out into the light of things; Let Nature be your teacher.” --W. WORDSWORTH. “In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then sociology--but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science.”--W. TROTTER, _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_. There are many facile comparisons to be drawn between the facts of biology and of sociology. The most obvious is that between a whole civilized community and one of the higher animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old fable in Menenius Agrippa’s Tale of the Belly and the Members in _Coriolanus_. With Darwin, and the establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely by analogies of his own mind’s weaving, but by the living bonds of genetic descent; and it was at once perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto been suspected might inhere in the comparisons between State and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, was not the State in a true sense an organism--a single biological unit composed of individual human beings just as a metazoan animal was a single biological unit composed, in the first instance, of individual cells? Further, the investigation of the evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general laws of its march: beings of the same original constitution, exposed to the environmental forces of the same planet, had reacted in similar ways, developing along parallel lines, and arriving at similar types of organization as end-result. Thus it might reasonably be supposed that we should find the same general organization and mode of development in one type of organism as in another, in human society as in a vertebrate. On these bases, Spencer and his followers drew elaborate comparisons of the two, and apparently believed that they were reaching the same degree of accuracy as that found in comparative anatomy when they compared the circulatory system of a mammal with the transport facilities of a State, or drew parallels between the brain and the cabinet.