BMJ REVIEW
Evolution And Heredity
Mutual Aid: A Factor Of Evolution by P. A. Kropotkin
The British Medical Journal,
Vol. 1, No. 2836 (May 8, 1915),
pp. 804-805
Published by: BMJ Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25313538
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
the ruminants that we find a highly developed practice of mutual aid. The squirrels are individualist to a great extent. Each of them builds its own comfortable nest, and accumulates its own provision. Their inclinations are towards family life, and Brehm found that a family of squirrels is never so happy as when the two broods of the same year can join together with their parents in a remote corner of a forest. And yet they maintain social relations. The inhabitants of the separate nests remain in a close intercourse, and when the pine-cones become rare in the forest they inhabit, they emigrate in bands. As to the black squirrels of the Far West, they are eminently sociable. Apart from the few hours given every day to foraging, they spend their lives in playing in numerous parties. And when they multiply too rapidly in a region, they assemble in bands, almost as numerous as those of locusts, and move southwards, devastating the forests, the fields, and the gardens; while foxes, polecats, falcons, and nocturnal birds of prey follow their thick columns and live upon the individuals remaining behind. The ground-squirrel — a closely-akin genus — is still more sociable. It is given to hoarding, and stores up in its subterranean halls large amounts of edible roots and nuts, usually plundered by man in the autumn. According to some observers, it must know something of the joys of a miser. And yet it remains sociable. It always lives in large villages, and Audubon, who opened some dwellings of the hackee in the winter, found several individuals in the same apartment; they must have stored it with common efforts. The large tribe, of the marmots, which includes the three large genuses of Arctomys, Cynomys, and Spermophilus, is still more sociable and still more intelligent. They also prefer having each one its own dwelling; but they live in big villages. That terrible enemy of the crops of South Russia — the souslik — of which some ten millions are exterminated every year by man alone, lives in numberless colonies; and while the Rus-
- Books Received
- Published:
Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution
Nature 67, 196–197(1903)
Abstract
THIS book is undeniably readable throughout. The author has a creed which he preaches with all the fervour of genuine conviction. He is anxious to make converts, but his zeal never leads him to forget fairness and courtesy. Those who disagree with him may learn much by studying the book.
Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution.
By P. Kropotkin. Pp. xix + 348. (London: Heinemann, 1902.)
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