The hypothesis is puerile, that force, conquest, and rapine originated in a meat diet. Equally puerile is the theory that the arts of government, navigation, agriculture, and manufactures were copied from animals.[877] Man is specially distinguished by his inventive capacity. Through this gift the arts and sciences are continuously progressive, and there is no plausibility in the supposition that his characteristic power was originally in abeyance. The gratuitous fancy that the arts of human civilisation were acquired from the brutes, could not be supported by less appropriate examples. Mankind are said by Pope to have been pre-eminently social, and he would have us believe that neither sociality nor convenience could teach them to construct their dwellings in proximity, till "reason late" suggested to them the reflection, that some birds, such as rooks, built their nests in clusters.[878] He acknowledges that a community of families perceived it would be for their interest to have a single ruler; but the principle that the subjects under a monarchy should retain their right to their houses and property, was discovered by observing that every bee in a hive had its separate cell, and separate honey,[879] which was a fiction of some unobservant naturalist, who credited bees with our usages. From the silk-worm we learn to "weave," and from, the mole to "plough," notwithstanding that the silk-worm only spins silk, and never weaves it, and that the subterranean scratchings of the mole have no resemblance to our contrivance, the plough. The remaining instances cited by Pope are just as absurd. He strung together fragments of ancient fables, which, in a modern copy, are neither poetry nor philosophy.