3. To Have and to Hold

The pair is a social arrangement with sexual conveniences of varying reward. The evolutionary value of the pair does not rest, however, on sexual necessity, for we have seen in natural arenas how flamboyantly sex can flourish without permanent arrangements. Natural selection's concern has been with offspring. Arena behavior is an evolutionary luxury permitted species in which the mother is fully capable of rearing young without masculine aid; there remain species beyond counting in which life is not so easy. The children may be too numerous, too complicated, or too long in their growing up. For these the pair, and what biologists call the pair bond, have been among evolution's most successful devices. But there has remained always a problem: how can nature ensure that the father will stay around and do his duty?

Julian Huxley made his first major contribution to biology in 1914, years before Eliot Howard wrote his book [76] on territory. It was a study of the great crested grebe, an aquatic bird not uncommon in England. Like the penguin, the grebe is of a family so ancient that its origins may well go back to the later days of the dinosaur and pterodactyl. And since the young zoologist came of fairly ancient lineage himself, he evidently felt that a Huxley could not plead youth as an excuse for jobs half done. His study of the great crested grebe was comprehensive, detailed, penetrating. It anticipated conclusions that the new biology, then unborn, would not reach for decades, and it established its author as the biologist of rank which he remains to this day.

Two of Huxley's countless observations concern us here. The first was his basic observation that the male grebe does not wind up his courtship of the female when coitus has been accomplished and eggs properly laid, but continues his displays all summer. Why? Huxley tentatively concluded that in a species requiring both parents to maintain the young, something must ensure that the bond between them be not disrupted. The male therefore keeps to his gallant ways long after the sexual lure can inspire them.

It was a startling conclusion, coming at a time when the repressed Victorians still tended, as did Freud himself, to explain everything by sex. But Huxley's other observation was just as far ahead of its time. He pondered over the unquenchable antagonisms of pair against pair, and wrote: "There may be simple hostility between members of one pair and members of another, but the only reason I can discover is the trespassing of one or both birds on the territory of another."

In those pre-territory days it was enough for Huxley to perceive the law that Howard was to elaborate; he did not attempt to relate it to the pair bond. But as scientific thought developed in later decades, it became apparent that the private territory held by a pair is a prime reinforcement for the bond between the two. Sexual attraction may initiate the bond, as it does in man -- or it may not, as we shall shortly see in the roebuck. Continued sexual activity may reinforce the bond, again as in man and to a degree in the gibbon; or it may offer little, as we shall see a bit farther along in the robin. But whatever the contribution that sex may make to the permanence of a parental arrangement, it is the private territory of a breeding [77] couple that provides most reliably that the children will not be neglected. Through its strange enhancement of powers in the male proprietor, energy not otherwise available is placed at family disposal. And through isolation of the two in their little world, and their joint antagonism for all others of their kind, nature keeps the pair where they belong, at the service of the next generation.

Whether evolution for reasons of selective benefit has encouraged the pair territory in the human being, just as in other animals, must be the final question of this chapter. We may dismiss the possibility that man is an arena species with the sad conclusion that we lack a morality of the proper biological order. No such dismissal can be made of the pair territory. Nevertheless, as we shuffle through the species and the developing thoughts of science, we must keep skeptically in mind that mere analogy will not prove that human institutions are the product of animal law.

The discovery that roe deer defend territory gives us a good place to start. For almost thirty years -- ever since the publication of A Herd of Red Deer, Frank Fraser Darling's contribution to the masterpieces of naturalists' prose -- it had been assumed that no species of deer defend territory. Even the superbly organized studies of the relationship between tiger and deer in Deccan India, made by George Schaller so recently that they have not yet been published, reveal no species that may be described as territorial. It was with some shock, therefore, that in 1964 I came on a feature story written by Colin Willock, author of The Enormous Zoo, and published in one of London's Sunday papers, implying that roe deer in southern England not only defend territories but are being used as an instrument of forest conservation. I called Willock and found that my surmise was correct. At the first opportunity I gathered together my safari equipment and set forth to penetrate the hazards of the Salisbury plain. In a village with the unlikely name of Six Penny Handley, fifteen miles north of Salisbury Cathedral's tall spire, I met the young forester who had wrested from Britain's manicured wilderness this secret previously unknown, and had put it to work.

The background for the discovery lay in the painful encounter between the British Forestry Commission and an animal who would not be dismayed. Soon after the [78] 1914-18 war Britain determined to regrow its dilapidated forests in the hope of achieving at least partial self-sufficiency in lumber supply. Marginal farmland was retired from cultivation and planted in trees; old neglected forests were cleaned up and renewed. The effort was massive. And nothing, of course, could have pleased the roe deer more. They are a woodland species who enjoy nature's leafy corridors, browse on new growth, and in this and other fashions make of themselves an unholy nuisance to forestry commissions. Deer multiplied faster than new trees could come up. Not even wholesale slaughter discouraged them, for if you are not a herd species and you take naturally to hiding in woods, then you are difficult to wipe out.

By 1957 the Forestry Commission came to a policy decision that murder would not suffice, and turned ignominiously to science. Richard Prior was at this time a young London businessman, thoroughly successful, who had encountered an equally harsh fact of British life: that since a family owned his business he could advance no further. As thoroughly fed up, he accepted an appointment from the Forestry Commission at £10 a week and received custody of a 2000-acre forest called Cranborne Chase on the edge of the village of Six Penny Handley.

Prior received his assignment on a try-anything basis partly out of the commission's desperation, and partly -- as he points out -- because it is embarrassing to pay a man that little and then interfere with his work too. Untrained in the sciences, he came of a hunting family, had known deer since he was a boy, and was a first-rate shot. When he arrived at Cranborne Chase it was with a hunter's desire to save the deer as well as his employer's forest. That he lacked the ethologist's specialized knowledge was of no importance, as things turned out.

Roe deer are not large animals, and they never form herds. In winter they tend to gather in disorganized groups wherever there is young growth to browse on. They will eat almost anything except white cedar -- beech, Norway spruce, even the Douglas fir which, transplanted to moist southern England, grows so well. The doe in this winter season is accompanied by her young of the previous year. Also, she is pregnant from last season's rut and will bear her new young in May. Despite her maternal preocupations, however, she must fend for herself. Not until the [79] middle of March, when the normally mild winter is lifting, will the does with their growing fawns and nearing accouchements start a dispersal through the forest, and will pairing begin.

Had Prior been trained in the sciences -- particularly in the sciences of our schools -- the error of an older biology might have fogged his view. Even ornithology until most recently has regarded pairing and territory as necessarily associated with the sexual impulse, and you and I have seen how in arena species sex and territory are woven in a tight, austere pattern. But when Prior began his systematic observations, he faced something quite different. The roebuck joins a doe who was probably not his mate last year, at a time when she is already pregnant. The rutting season is far away at summer's end. Nevertheless, the two will drift together through the budding forest to some congenial area probably of her choice. There he will establish a private territory of considerable size, sharing it with his doe and her last season's young. Not till May will she deliver her new fawns, sired almost surely by somebody else. He will protect the lot, and unless we are to regard it as a system for stepfathers, paternal impulses can be credited no more than can sexual.

I have suggested that natural selection's concern is with offspring, not sex, and the roebuck's territorial urge, seasonal in nature, seems to coincide with nothing else. When her time comes, she twins. Single births are normal in deer species. Roe, however, not only have twins but have them at a time when last year's fawn (as a rule only one has survived the winter) is not yet independent. Here is the biological situation of a mother with offspring too numerous to handle alone, and the biological answer of the pair, and a husband who though temporary will defend her and ensure both her privacy and an exclusive food supply. And to make sure that he will not wander, evolution has nailed him with a territorial instinct.

Roe territories may be seasonal, but within that season the roebuck is a sturdy defender who will tolerate no trespassers. The larger and stronger he is, the greater area will he control, and it is this quality in the male, I discovered, which makes possible the Prior system of forest conservation. Since the buck is monogamous and will tolerate none on his territory but his wife and stepchildren, the roe population in a forest has an inverse proportion to [80] the quality of the bucks. If all are Grade A, each defending successfully perhaps one hundred acres, the population will be small; if all are Grade Q, each able to defend no more than ten, the population will be large. By careful culling of weaker bucks, Prior not only acts as an agent of natural selection in the improvement of the roe-deer breed, but also guarantees the Forestry Commission that Cranborne Chase with maximum territories will shelter a minimum roe-deer population and suffer a minimum of roe-deer damage.

I was delighted. Never before had I encountered anyone who had taken the territorial principle and put it on a paying basis. But my delight was merely getting started, for the young ex-businessman had unconsciously reached into one of the subtlest corners of Continental ethology to perfect his system. His recognition that a roe-deer "displacement activity" is the source of the most severe forest damage led him to the conclusion that territories must be large but not too large. And to comprehend his discovery, we must make an ethological detour.

An antelope like the kob or the kudu has horns which are a lifetime fixture; deer, as we know, grow an annual crop of antlers which they shed in the fall. The tender young bumps which replace last year's antlers are covered with the skin called velvet, and when the bony growth has reached full spread and hardness, the buck scrapes off the velvet against the trunks of trees. It is an action known as "fraying," and an early Prior discovery was that fraying does far more damage to the forest than winter browsing off new growth. The scraping back and forth of hard antlers against soft young tree trunks may de-velvet the antlers, but it also de-barks the trees and distorts their growth. But the most damaging of all fraying, because of its violence, has nothing to do with scraping off dead skin. It occurs when two wrought-up roebucks face each other across a mutual territorial boundary. Will they fight? Not likely. They will attack the neighboring trees.

Displacement activity, widely observed by students of animal behavior, is a concept which in its precise instinctual implications has been carried over into human psychology. Just the same, what is bothering the embattled roebucks is something that not infrequently bothers you and me. When we are confronted by two opposite course of action -- to fight or to flee, for example, or to prolong [81] our insults or apologize -- we tend for the moment to take a predictable third course unrelated to the other two.

One of the more hilarious antics in the repertory of animal behavior is that of the herring gull, as described by Tinbergen, when one gets into the situation facing the roebucks. He too operates a pair territory -- a small one surrounding his nest -- and if he discovers a neighbor intruding on his property, then with beating wings and resounding screeches he will chase him back where he belongs. The indignant intruder, no longer an intruder but safe on his own property, will now face his antagonist at the boundary. There will be threats, and heads will be lifted high and wings readied for beating. Since they face each other not two feet apart yet both are still gripped by ferocity's storm, any observer will predict instant battle. But there will be no battle. Both gulls instead will suddenly, murderously, start pulling up grass.

It is nest-building; or rather, it is a third course of action, neither fighting nor fleeing, derived from an unrelated activity, building a nest. Tinbergen found the key to it by means of comparative behavior. The three-spined stickleback, a belligerent, highly territorial fish, has. exactly the same displacement activity. The male stickleback digs a nest in the sandy bottom of those shallow waters which he frequents at breeding time. And when two male sticklebacks, proprietors of adjoining properties, get into a border uproar and pursue one another back and forth, now on one property, now on the other, to wind up facing each other at the invisible wall bubbling rage and frustrated [82] fury, both will as suddenly as the herring gulls up-end to a vertical position and while goggling at each other in loathing stand on their heads and dig holes in the sand.

Displacement activity is species-specific, a zoologist's term meaning that all members of a species will have the same specific trait, whether color of feather or manner of behavior. The herring gull will always pull grass, the stickleback always dig a hole. When antagonists face each other over a boundary, each inhibited from further attack or further flight, their energy is still popping away. And so it "sparks over" -- another ethologist's term -- into a third instinctual channel which will cause no damage to either party but will give outlet to the energy. It is as if a built-in short circuit or safety valve is arranged in the switchboard of instinct. That outlet, of course, will not always be nest-building. Uncertain fighting cocks will peck at the ground as if for food. So will skylarks. Since great tits feed not on the ground but in trees, they find their outlet in tearing at leaves and buds.

Recognition of displacement activity as a fundamental process has been one of ethology's major achievements. Preening -- poking at one's feathers or licking one's fur -- is a third course in so many species that Niko Tinbergen has been able to isolate an independent instinct which he calls "care of body surface." Were it not an instinct with a pattern of its own, then there would be no circuit into which frustrated energy could spark over. And however sincerely the cultural anthropologists may advise you concerning the insignificance of your instincts, a playwright who for many a season has made a profession of watching his fellow beings must necessarily wonder: is not man a "care of body surface" species?

Watch a prizefight on television, or small boys in a schoolyard fight. Hesitant, uncertain as to whether to attack or back away, antagonists will dab at their noses. Care of the nose is an important human outlet in moments of indecision; women will powder it. Hair, however, is just as important. Whether I am a Filipino or a New York executive or a tribesman in Ruanda, when I do not know what to do, say, or think next, I shall probably rub my chin or scratch my head. It is a species-specific gesture which I cannot believe is a product of learning and which seems to be older than modern man, since it is interracial. But if I am a woman I shall almost never rub my beardless [83] chin; I shall feel around instead in my back hair where it is longest. Yet there is something about attention to hair which seems associated with sexual maturity. Children rarely do it, tending instead to bite their fingernails. The adult is unlikely to bite his fingernails, but in moments of inner stress or distraction or embarrassment will carefully inspect them.

Whether man is or is not a "care of body surface" species must be a matter of fair significance to those who dismiss patterns of instinct from the human mechanism. Since no school of human psychology has ever, to my knowledge, pursued the question, we have no scientific evidence to go on and shall be well advised to abandon it to future and more competent authority. Of one thing, however, we may be sure: man may have learned to rub his chin at his mother's breast, but the roebuck did not learn to take apart trees at the same source.

In roe forests, when furious territorial neighbors face each other over their common boundary, daring neither to advance nor to retreat, their frustrated rage will spark over into that activity normal to scraping dried velvet from their antlers. It may be summer and the velvet long gone, the antlers bare and as hard as iron. Nevertheless, fraying will absorb their energies and, to the terror of the Forestry Commission, they will attack all convenient trees with a racket to be heard for hundreds of yards. And as a solution Prior is applying still another ethological principle.

There is a law of territorial behavior as true of the single roebuck defending his private estate as it is of a band of howling monkeys defending its domain held in common. Huxley long ago observed that any territory is like a rubber disc: the tighter it is compressed, the more powerful will be the pressure outward to spring it back into shape. A proprietor's confidence is at its peak in the heartland, as is an intruder's at its lowest. Here the proprietor will fight hardest, chase fastest. That confidence, however, will wane as the proprietor approaches his border, vanish as he crosses it. Having entered his neighbor's yard, an urge to flee will replace his urge to fight, just as his neighbor's confidence and fighting urge will be restored by the touch of his vested soil.

It is a subtle law, a profound one, and it is universal. Richard Prior made use of it in his adjustment of roebucks and lumber. He reasoned that if too many roebucks [84] share the forest, then each will have a territory too small for its energy, rage at the border will be at a maximum, and fraying and damage to trees at its most disastrous. On the other hand, if there is underpopulation, then territories will be too large for proprietors to control and the spring of the rubber disc will be exhausted short of the boundary. In quantitative terms, there will be more space in the forest than the total of roebuck confidence, and younger bucks will infiltrate, establish new territories in weakly defended areas, and restore the old situation of tight borders, vast angers, and dilapidated trees.

Lack of training in the sciences did not prevent the former London businessman from pursuing his far-out exercises in behavioral mathematics. Season after season, through careful culling and continual observation, he has come closer and closer to that perfect balance of population and space which satisfies the territorial confidence of every male but gives him the least reason to rage at the border, and the least surplus energy for demolishing trees.

By the time of the rutting season, of course, the major threat to the forest fairly well ends. The rut starts as a rule in the last week of July when the doe has weaned her new fawns. Her time of physical vulnerability has ended, her time of romantic vulnerability has arrived. The buck turns his energies from chasing his neighbor to chasing his wife, from the ruination of young oak trees to the consummation of young affections. Next door his neighbor is similarly diverted. It is a strenuous season, since for satisfactions quite unknown the male pursues the female at high speed, frequently to the point where both are too exhausted for copulation. "Roe rings," beaten, circular [85] paths, are a feature of English forests. Some may be quite ancient, a cultural modification of the landscape favored by generation after generation of does and bucks in the heat of their romantic pursuits.

Early in August the rut ends. The roebuck is in a state of collapse, and the territorial system collapses with him. He wanders off. Where he goes, no one can quite say, perhaps for a holiday in another forest. She may see him again in the late autumn when frosts sharpen and nights lengthen and the roe drift through the bramble and hazel and red oak to their winter establishments. If she sees him she will not recognize him. She and he will be strangers. The bond between them, so close for a season, was defined in truth by nothing but real estate.

No natural arrangement in all the colorful departments of vertebrate life is quite so prevalent, and perhaps quite so primitive, as the pair on its territory. Gilliard has described the pair bond as the central fact in the lives of 99 percent of the world's bird species. Some, it is true, reinforce that bond through astonishing means. The jackdaw is non-territorial, yet pairs for life, with a record of broken homes that is virtually nonexistent. The male jackdaw, however, is a husband more gallant than even the great-crested grebe, and he continually feeds his mate beakfuls of minced worm and saliva. In African Genesis I described that harried episode in the career of Konrad Lorenz when a misguided jackdaw fell in love with him and, finding no undefended orifice in which to place his affectionate tribute, finally dumped it in the naturalist's ear.

A still more original means of reinforcing the pair bond has recently come to light in the studies of Kenya's bou-bou shrike by Myles North and W. H. Thorpe. In heavy tropical foliage, it seems, a pair of birds may have difficulty keeping in contact. For such species territorial isolation and defense may be impractical and be discouraged by evolution as maladaptive. Yet there remains the eternal Problem of keeping pairs unbroken. In the bou-bou shrike natural selection has perfected a startling capacity for antiphonal singing. The birds, though out of sight of each other, sing duets. Melodies are peculiar to the pair, [86] and since either may sing any portion of the duet, the songs become means of identifying one's mate. Such a substitution of musical composition for territory, however, places a dismaying demand on bird creativity. One pair, recorded by North, sang seventeen different melodies in the course of a single day. And such bird creativity places a dismaying demand on human capacity for explanation: pairs in the Kenya wild sing in the basic intervals of what we regard as our conventional, man-created, diatonic scale.

The bou-bou shrike's system of keeping father home because he can sing duets with none but his wife we may regard as exotic. The bread-and-butter system is the pair territory. One finds it dominating the life of one of our closest primate cousins, that small successful ape, the gibbon. C. R. Carpenter's study of the lar gibbon in Thailand, published in 1940, survived decades of skepticism to find confirmation in John Ellefson's 1965 report on the same species in Malaya.

Unlike any other ape and like few monkeys, the gibbon lives in a single-family group, paired on a territory usually for life. The male's great siren call, which one hears so frequently echoing through a zoo, is an announcement of his location to his neighbors, a warning to all that trespassers will not be tolerated, and when he is in a restless mood it is an invitation to any like-spirited gibbon to appear on the boundary and do battle. Small though he is, the quick acrobat of the treetops can control a forest area as large as a quarter of a square mile. Though his mate [87] will never join him in actual combat, she may accompany him to the embattled border, there to groom him and lend him moral support between forays.

The question of Why? has dominated territorial ponderings from the beginning. Why spend so much energy in the defense of a portion of land indistinguishable from the next portion? So far as the gibbon is concerned, both Carpenter and Ellefson see the principal function as protection of food supply. But up to a hundred acres of' tropical forest is a lavish, pantry for a mother and father gibbon, along with two or three growing gibbons. It was dissatisfaction with the food theory, among others then projected, that led the English ornithologist David Lack to relate territory to the pair bond.

Lack is at present director of the Earl Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at Oxford. In the mid-1930's he was a teacher at Devon's Dartington Hall. There for five years he kept one eye glued on children and the other eye, evidently, as firmly glued on robins. Out of this dedicated robin-watching came a book called The Life of the Robin, which must stand with Eliot Howard's classic, with Darling's tribute to a herd of red deer, with Niko Tinbergen's The Herring Gull's World and Konrad Lorenz' King Solomon's Ring, among the literary treasures of the new natural history.

As early as 1933 David Lack had expressed his uneasiness concerning interpretations of territory then current. What was the chief selective value that such behavior brought to a species' chances of survival? By then -- as I reviewed in the last chapter -- several interpretations had been suggested and were being argued: that territory protected food supply, that it dispersed population in relation to environmental resource, that it offered a criterion for the selection of superior males. Lack found so many exceptions to any single interpretation that he began to doubt territory as a general law in the behavior of birds. Then in that year he reported for work at Dartington Hall and tegan clambering out of bed in the early hours to watch robins busy at their daybreak deeds.

The robin is one of the most enthusiastic of territorial features. (And as an American I must point out with territorial deflation that what we call a robin is a thrush with a red breast.) Besides his enthusiasm for exclusive property, the English robin has an equal enthusiasm for [88] battle. Lack built a huge aviary thirty feet long with the plan of trapping birds and placing them in the aviary where he could watch them work out their social arrangements. But the plan developed complications. The aviary allowed a beaten bird no room for escape, and one male killed four other males in just four days. While it is possible that the murderer may have had a bad family background, suffered a deprived youth, or been a victim of propaganda, it seems on the surface more likely that he enjoyed nothing more than a good fight. Lack recorded that while sex may be the most fun that some animals get, in robins it is definitely fighting.

Trapping robins, in truth, was far easier than knowing what to do with them. A cock stakes out his borders on a lawn. From then on he has such an excessive curiosity concerning any foreign object lying about on his property that, should it be a trap, he will promptly find himself inside it. Lack had only to put out the most conspicuous trap available, and he would have a robin within two hours. One cock became a nuisance. He came to like traps. Trying to trap his mate, Lack had to let out the cock seven times on one particular day, eight times the next.

Like most birds, the robin sings only within his borders, where he pours out his defense and defiance. As in most species, the song is usually enough to keep away intruders. Should song fail, then the cock is ready for battle, but his opponent must be a robin. By experiment Lack discovered that it was an intruder's red breast that inflamed the proprietor's rage. He would ignore or merely investigate a variety of stuffed birds placed on his lawn; a mere tuft of red feathers was enough to bring on warfare. But since battle is preceded by one last attempt of the proprietor to discourage intrusion by peaceful means, Lack had to witness a scene of fair absurdity: his cock robins, red breasts puffed out like toy balloons, turning front side to side through an arc of 180 degrees while they displayed their frightening frontside to a bunch of red feathers a few inches away.

Niko Tinbergen had a comparable experience with his three-spined sticklebacks, the same creatures who stand of their heads in the water and dig holes in the sand durinj border disputes. When the breeding season arrives, the male stickleback stakes out a territory and develops a red underside and a furious disposition. He too will attack [89] anything red. In his laboratory Tinbergen had some twenty aquaria lined up along window sills facing the street, all loaded with three-spined sticklebacks shielded from each other's view but yearning for mortal enemies. One day, to the scientist's astonishment, every male dashed to the window side of his tank, dorsal spines raised for action. One of Britain's red postal vans had passed in the street outside.

There is a considerable difference, however, between robins and three-spined sticklebacks: robins do not confine either their red breasts or their fiery belligerence to the breeding season, and neither do they confine them to the male. The hen has a red breast too, and in the autumn may stake out a territory of her own, sing on it, and respond to any intrusion with energy equal to the cock's. One autumn morning David Lack put a stuffed robin on the end of a six-foot stake and planted it within the borders of a notably fierce hen. For forty minutes she postured and sang and flew at the insolent specimen, pecking it again and again. Then the breakfast gong rang and Lack's appetite overcame his scientific curiosity. He pulled up his stake and went into the house. Fortunately he looked back. The hen was still attacking the place in the air where the stuffed robin had been. And she continued her attacks, violently pecking the air but with each attack striking an imaginary target that sank lower until at last it was only three feet off the ground. I do not believe that any reputable scientist has ever attempted an explanation for this one.

It is almost as difficult to offer an explanation for how cock robins and hen robins, equally ferocious, equally stimulated by their identical red breasts, ever get together and have little robins. It is a fact of robin life that they do. She will appear on his territory one winter day. He will fly to her. He will become most excited for a few minutes, and then, we must assume, they will consider themselves paired. They will share the territory, defending it together, as from then on they share their daily life. When springtime comes they will mate and raise a brood. But why did he let her into the place to begin with? Lack's only explanation after five years of robin-watching is that the cock knows it must be a hen because if she were a cock she would have lost her courage and flown away. The answer may not sound very scientific, but since there seems no better one, it will have to do. [90]

These were the long years of robin-watching, however that put Lack to pondering the value of the pair territory to the pair bond. Robins on the lawns of Devon might pair with a little moment of display and excitement as early as December. Through three hard months until nesting time they will lead a most ordinary life, feeding, finding shelter from the cold, driving off intruders, largely ignoring each other. It is not too different from the life of roe deer before the rut. The roebuck, of course, has his specialized activity of territorial defense, while the doe must bear and care for her young. But it is a social relationship, isolated from all other members of the species by the privacy of the pair territory. So it is with robins. Unburdened by young, he and she in these early months lead a life alike. Isolated on a mutual territory, joined in its defense, they form a special relationship, a familiarity, which can be described by no word other than psychological. Rarely in this period of betrothal will one desert the other. The relationship -- this bond -- has become of such potency that neither can do without it.

With warming weather, sap will flow in the veins of trees and hormones in the veins of robins. One fine day she will hump over, giving the signal, and he will mount her and that will be just about that. It is difficult to think of a species that gets less fun out of sex. There will be a fine to-do of nest-building, for the hen is very fast. A gardener at Basingstroke hung up his coat in a toolshed at nine fifteen one morning and returned shortly after noon to discover an almost complete robin nest in a pocket. And confusion may confound the haste. The robin builds always in a hole. One hen built in a stack of pipes, got mixed up, and rounded out the experience building twenty-three nests. Another was attracted by the pigeonholes of an old-fashioned desk in a workshop. There were sixteen pigeonholes and she built twelve nests before mastering the situation. But she still raised her brood. Among the wonders of the natural world is determination, shared equally by animals and, at their best, by men.

When young robins hatch, one begins to understand why pair bonds are necessary. Robin-raising is not the kind w industry which the male can desert to visit an arena, a bower, or the saloon at the corner. For a few days the female will spend most of her time on the nest, and he will bring all the food, passing it to her to be stuffed into [91] the four, five, or six gaping mouths. By the end of a week she will spend no time at all on the nest, since the collective appetite it shelters will have developed by then to proportions which two parents can scarcely keep up with. In England green caterpillars swarm during the robin's major breeding season. On a day in early May, Lack kept count on a nest containing five young. The parents paid it twenty-nine visits per hour, each time bringing two or three caterpillars. He reckoned that in the course of a full working day the pair harvested about one thousand caterpillars. There is also fecal matter to be hauled away. Baby robins deliver their feces in little gelatinous sacs which the parents carry at least twenty yards away from the nest. In the same day there will be forty or fifty such sacs to be disposed of.

After about two weeks the fledglings leave the nest, but they will pick up no food for themselves for another eight or ten days. The parents are relieved of the necessity of returning to the nest, since the young follow them about, or of carrying away fecal matter. But that is all they are relieved of, for through this time the young are growing bigger and bigger, their gullets more and more cavernous. Finally, three weeks after leaving the nest, they will be on their own. One would think that the pair, after all this, would take a holiday at some robin resort. But they will not. She will hump over a little, and he will get the signal and mount her, and then she will get busy building another nest in somebody's coat pocket, and they will have another brood.

For such heroic labors evolution must provide heroic tools. The pair bond, such a tool, holds in most species only for a season, since that is sufficient. In the life of the robin, a day will come when she will fly away, and that will be the end of it. He will remain on his territory, investigating foreign objects, singing, displaying his red breast to tiresome intruders, getting into brawls. Perhaps she will migrate; perhaps she will take up an autumn territory, sing, and attack stuffed robins on the ends of stakes. Perhaps -- only perhaps -- they will pair again some winter day, but it is most unlikely. If it occurs, it will be due to accident. She will have been drawn to the same old territory, and if a cat has not got him, he will still be there.

In many species, however, the bond holds for life. Wrens, like gibbons as we have seen, will pair and occupy [92]

the same territory all of their days. Mockingbirds will share a territory through the breeding season. She will grow a bit bored with him, though, when the young have flown away, and she will take up a property next door. Maybe it is for the sake of her career, since she cannot sing unless she has a place of her own. Through autumn and winter, if the weather is fine, they will sing to each other almost as do bou-bou shrikes in Kenya. Then a time will come, I suppose, when the bond will pull hard, or her career will seem not enough, and she will move back with him and give up singing for another season.

David Lack, thinking it over on shivery mornings in Devon, was willing to grant the economic advantages of a private domain. If you are going to have to harvest a thousand green caterpillars a day, then it is an advantage to draw many of them from a nearby, private stock. And yet if it were simply economics, as Altum had thought, then robin territories should be of a fairly standard size to supply a fairly standard larder. And they were not. They varied in Devon from two acres down to a quarter of an acre, and even on the smallest a pair could successfully raise their brood. Then there was that other answer of Eliot Howard's, the selection of males through territorial competition. In some species this might be of critical or even total importance. But four out of five cock robins succeed in gaining properties, and while the elimination of the fifth from breeding represents a selective value to the species, it did not seem to Lack a value that critical. The pair bond, however, was another matter. Without such a link between cock and hen, enduring so long as the young need them, there would be no more robins. And it is the mutual territory that forges the link.

One encounters again the moral implications of territorial behavior. That scientific thought, despite the Moffats and the Lacks, has remained for so long absorbed by territory as an expression of self-interest is entirely natural. The private territory represents a monopoly of a portion of the earth's land or water; as such, it tempts the most obvious question, what does the proprietor get out of it? But to take such a view is to see nothing but trees; the eternal forest escapes us. It is only when we brood, dissatisfied as was Lack with older views, that the evolutionary landscape emerges.

The pair territory is a restraint on the actions of the [93] individual. The attachment of male and female to a single property is an attachment to each other more permanent than sexual opportunity. Freedom is denied, anarchy forestalled. A biological necessity for the male to be responsible for the welfare of his offspring is enforced through a biological attachment for the space they occupy. As the territorial imperative reaches into the lives of all members of an arena species, shaping and channeling the sexual instinct to the species' genetic good, so it reaches into the lives of all members of a pair species to shape and constrain their physical freedom according to the necessities of their demanding offspring.

The cock robin, displaying his puffed-up, pompous breast to a tuft of red feathers, may seem to possess an ego as large as all the countryside. But if it be so, then he has been trapped by that ego. Nature -- brilliantly, subtly -- has turned the tables on him and made of his little kingdom a moral prison from which he cannot escape his obligation to future robins.

The parallel between human marriage and animal pairing requires no lecturer with a long, pointed wand. The parallel between human desire for a place that is one's own and animal instinct to stake out such a private domain requires even less demonstration. Equally obvious must be the classification of the human species among those animal [94] species facing the biological problem of offspring with demands of appalling proportions. And as obvious in our modern society as on a lawn in Devon is the necessity to reinforce the pair bond in the interest of normal development of our forever-demanding young. Are we then, confronted by parallels of such a conspicuous order, to dismiss the possibility that man is a territorial species and that evolution, with its territorial imperative, has perfected an innate behavioral mechanism commanding precisely the morality we seek? Yet we do so dismiss it as with our every righteous thought we denigrate the role of private property in human affairs.

That man is a territorial species has been the conclusion of many a scientist. Zurich's Heini Hediger has written: "It can be assumed that the natural history of territoriality in the animal kingdom represents the first chapter of the history of property in mankind." Harrison Matthews, of London's Zoological Society, was asked at a symposium if he regarded man as a territorial animal. He replied most simply, "Yes, certainly. You have only to notice the signboards dotted all over the countryside announcing that 'Trespassers will be prosecuted.'" Years ago the University of Michigan's respected zoologist W. H. Burt wrote: "Man considers it his inherent right to own property, either as an individual or as a member of a group or both. Further, he is ever ready to protect that property against aggressors, even to the extent at times of sacrificing his own life. That this behavioristic pattern is not peculiar to man, but is a' fundamental characteristic of animals in general, has been shown for diverse animal groups." Even longer ago, in 1931, Walter Heape wrote in his Emigration, Migration and Nomadism: "It may be held that the recognition of territorial rights, one of the most significant attributes of civilization, was not evolved by man but has ever been an inherent factor in the life history of animals."

That man's territorial nature is inherent and of evolutionary origin is scarcely a new thought; it is merely an ignored one. It has been pressed aside by our political antipathies, by our sexual preoccupations, by our romantic fallacies concerning the uniqueness of man, by our contemporary dedication to the myth that man is without instinct, and a creature solely of his culture. Yet it would seem to me a thought which we may ignore no longer. As our populations expand, as a world-wide movement from [95] countryside to city embraces all peoples, as problems of housing, of broken homes and juvenile delinquency, of mass education and delayed independence of the young rise about us in our every human midst, as David Riesman's phrase "the lonely crowd" comes more and more aptly to describe all humankind, have we not the right to ask: Is what we are witnessing, in essence, not the first consequence of the deterritorializing of man? And if man is a territorial animal, then as we seek to repair his dignity and responsibility as a human being, should we not first search for means of restoring his dignity and responsibility as a proprietor?

Our first search, of course, must be for evidence that he is indeed a territorial animal. Though many a scientist will testify that he is, many another will disagree. And while we may pursue without end certain parallels between animal and human behavior, there will remain always the chance that what we observe in man is a kind of mirror held up to nature; our culture and our learning reflect the natural way without in a biological sense being beholden to it. I myself do not take such an outside chance very seriously, but still the argument must be answered. If we behave as we do in our attachment for property because we have been taught to, because our culture and our social mechanisms demand it of us, then we deal with nothing fundamental. What is learned may be unlearned, and we may assume that man will adjust himself to collective existence or to the lonely crowd. But if, in sharp contrast, we deal with an innate behavior pattern, an open instinct, an inward biological demand placed in our nature by the selective necessities of our evolutionary history, then we deal with the changeless. And we hold in our hand a secret key: if lost, it will leave locked and starved and frustrated a vital portion of our nature, but if used, it may open human potentials which today we cannot glimpse.

I believe that our century has presented us with a means to demonstrate that our attachment for property is of an ancient biological order. At the opening of this chapter I suggested that the value of the pair territory to the animal pair is twofold. Through isolation of the pair on the mutual property a guarantee is effected that neither will desert the family obligations. This we have inspected. But also I suggested that the mysterious enhancement of powers which a territory invariably summons in its male proprietor places [96] energy otherwise unavailable at family disposal. If such enhancement of energy occurs in man, then one cannot explain it as a cultural lesson. And so let us now take another glance through the species and consider the beaver, a fish, a cricket, and a worm, before we return to man.

"As busy as a beaver" is a phrase that must have come to our tongue a very long time ago, and whoever first described the beaver as busy perhaps made further discussion of the animal superfluous. Some years ago, however, an American named Glenn W. Bradt -- a man evidently unwilling to leave any cliche unturned -- made a thorough study of about forty beaver colonies in Michigan. It was one of those solid, careful, thoughtful jobs on which this inquiry thrives. Bradt came to the conclusion that beavers are busy.

We may regard a pair of robins harvesting a thousand caterpillars a day, while between servings having to haul away fecal matter in countless small packages, as creatures whose beaks have been pressed rather heavily against the evolutionary grindstone. But between robins and beavers there is an eminent difference: robins work that hard through a few hysterical weeks in the breeding season; beavers do it the year around. And the beaver, not unlike man, seems to have got himself into this life of hard labor through dependence on a culture which may have seemed a bright evolutionary idea to begin with but developed into one of relentless demand.

To be fair to the beaver, it was not his cultural achievement that got him into trouble so much as his vulnerability to predators and his strange appetite for trees. The food supply for a beaver colony consists of a reserve of young saplings such as aspen, willow, or maple. And the beaver's cultural solution for problems of both food and security has been, as we all know, the dam in a wilderness stream, the backed-up pond, and island lodges protected by surrounding water. Since he builds his installation out of the same material from which he prepares his dinner, he has at all times a quick snack handy.

Just how hard he works to support all this may be judged from the records of one of Bradt's colonies. There were six beavers. In 353 days they cut down 1040 trees, hauled them to the pond, stripped them, cut them into segments, and used them either for construction, for the evening meal, or for storage in the pantry. If the beaver [97] does not have four conditions in his life -- permanence of site, an assured supply of wood, a limited population in a single colony, and a willingness to work hard -- he cannot attain real success. He has solved all four through the pair territory.

We speak of a beaver colony, but the forty colonies studied by Bradt were all in reality families, and there is reason to believe that no colony is ever larger than a family group. The male pairs for life. The pair establish a territory. It must be large enough to offer permanent food supply, but if it is too large they will be unable to defend it, and, more important, they will be unable to work it economically. The mother has one litter of kits in a year, usually four in number. And so the population consists of the kits of the season, the yearlings of the previous season, and the pair. Two-year-olds are never found in a colony. When next season's kits are born, this season's yearlings will leave or be driven out. The homeplace cannot support them. They must go forth into the wilderness, furnish food for the foxes, or happily found other dams on other-streams.

Like the robin, the beaver is easily trapped. For bait one has only to cause some slight break in his dam and he will be there in moments to repair it. In the winter when the pond is frozen and the family sleeps securely within the lodge, the father frequently lives in a burrow on the bank. There is the risk of the predator, but it is a risk he must take. He must be free to keep an eye on his property. The energy to work at a tireless pace, the unflagging attention, the willingness to gamble individual survival, are all a portion of the beaver's territorial psychology.

Why the possession of a territory should be a source of extra energy in the proprietor is a mystery, as I have indicated, which science may never solve. Some of our best ethological thinkers have analyzed the phenomenon in terms of confidence in the familiar and fear of the strange. This would do if we dealt always with areas fairly large or complex or in one way and another offering surprises to the intruder, comforting secrets to the defender. But it cannot explain to me why a Uganda kob, standing on his putting green, is very nearly invulnerable. His little property with its close-clipped grass offers as few secrets as it does surprises. Nor can it explain to me why sea birds like the gannet or the guillemot or the herring gull should be aU but unbeatable on territories measuring a few feet in [98] diameter. Nor does it truly explain to me why two roebucks or two three-spined sticklebacks or two pine squirrels or two infuriated seals Can face each other across an unseen line, each with perfect confidence that if he is attacked he will win, each with perfect lack of confidence in his survival prospects just a few feet across the border.

"Victory goes not to the strong but to the righteous -- the righteous of course being the owners of property." This was how David Lack put it, concerning birds. But the law holds just as good for primates and defending groups, as C. R. Carpenter discovered over thirty years ago in his observations of the howling monkey. No matter what the circumstance of battle, Carpenter concluded, the home team wins. Later research would show that the increase of energy brought by property to its proprietor, while beyond explanation, is not beyond measurement.

The late W. C. Allee of the University of Chicago was one of the founders of the new biology. I shall enter little into his work in this book because his chief concern was with society and orders of dominance. But part of Allee's greatness was his capacity to turn out able students, and one of those students was a man named J. C. Braddock, who in 1949 performed with platys an experiment of unrivaled scientific elegance. It was the kind of laboratory experiment to remind us that not everything can be learned in the open air.

Platypoecilus maculatus is familiar to anyone who has ever tolerated a tankful of tropical fish in his home. The platy is tiny, and Braddock used over three hundred of them to demonstrate in precise, quantitative terms what the simple factor of residence can mean to the confidence of a living organism. The platy is not territorial. We deal here with some essential ingredient of life that becomes formalized by territory. To demonstrate it, Braddock put each of his platys into a small aquarium, half of the bowls with a little duckweed, half with none. Those with the duckweed he termed residents; those without, intruders. He allowed his residents a little time to become familiar with their duckweed-distinguished homes. Then to each tank of a resident he introduced an intruder.

When two or more fish are in the same tank there will always be a struggle for dominance. When the struggle is resolved, a fairly stable relationship will be formed in which one fish usually or always gives way to the other, usually or [99] always retreats when attacked, usually or always in the end will allow the other priority in feeding or females or favorite resting places. In African Genesis I described an experiment with male swordtails, another tropical fish, who when water has been cooled to a certain degree will lose all interest in a ready female but will continue their struggles to dominate one another. "Alpha fish" is the term used by the new biology to describe the winner of such a competition.

Braddock's experiment was designed to test what effect prior residence would have on the outcome of the competition for dominance. Half of his intruders were larger than the residents, half smaller. And he found that size and strength would have some effect on the determination of which would be the alpha fish, but not much. It was residence that counted. Even when the resident was the smaller fish, he would be the first to challenge four times as often as the larger intruder. And when the struggle was resolved, the intruder would be the loser four times as often if he was the smaller fish, three times as often even though he was the larger.

One would think that as time went by and both became familiar with the tank, the slim advantage of prior residence would cease to have meaning. And to a degree it was true. Even so, of those original residents who were smaller than the original intruders, half remained permanently the alpha fish. And such was the outcome, we must keep in mind, in a species which is not truly territorial. Comparable experiments by G. P. Baerends, a Dutch ethologist, with members of the cichlid group of fishes, all of whom defend true territories, have shown that for an intruder to oust a proprietor he must be very nearly twice as big.

I am choosing examples from fairly primitive creatures. [100] I mentioned in connection with the cicada-killer wasp that territorial behavior has been observed in few insects. Several years ago, however, in the University of Michigan's zoologv department Richard Alexander was experimenting with dominant orders in crickets. They are renowned fighters and in some parts of the world people gamble on them as they do on cocks. (A cricket match in the Orient has a rather different meaning than in England.) Alexander had a batch of fighting crickets which he matched again and again in varying combinations to determine the order of dominance. Two of the crickets were quite even in size and strength and agility. Even so, one dominated the other so thoroughly that in 200 bouts he was the winner of all but one. Then both crickets found niches where they would retire and sing. The niches were territories. After that, domination was over and every bout was decided by where it took place. The winning cricket was invariably the cricket closest to his niche.

I am making no effort to explain this force, because obviously I cannot. But since in my opinion it is a force as demonstrable, as predictable, yet just as inexplicable in men as it is in crickets, I shall present one more example from the life of a creature even more primitive than the insect.

For some years the planarian worm has been a riotous citizen of a good many American laboratories. He has been shocked by electricity, denied food and water, taught everything but the ABC's, and even chopped up and fed to his less-educated friends. There is little doubt that many of the experiments are leading us toward a moment when we must form new principles concerning life itself; but there is little doubt also that some of the conclusions being formed are premature. Among the experiments, however, there has been one so unspectacular in its outline, so careful in its controls, so haunting in its implications that it bears inspection here. This was a study made by Jay Boyd Best and Irvin Rubinstein at the Walter Reed Army Institute in Washington.

The planarian worm is a small marine creature found, for example, in the bayous of Louisiana. He has no true central nervous system, but simply a pair of nerves running down his back, an arrangement fashionable half a billion years ago. What evolved as a brain in later ages consists in the planarian of nothing but a pair of enlarged ganglia furnishing connectives between the two nerves. The ganglia [101] provide a semblance of a head sufficient to indicate which end of him is which, but it cannot be very important, for if you cut him in two he will grow a new head at the front of the old back section. Also, he has no circulatory system, and his origins go back so far as to antedate common biological developments in plumbing; he has no rectum, and rids himself of waste through special pores in his skin. So far as sex is concerned, the world of the planarian worm offers limited entertainment. He is capable on occasion of laying an egg, although normally he reproduces himself by division. Nature presented this creature to our ancient swamps somewhat before she completed her experiments with sex. It was a long time ago.

Now, it stretches imagination to the breaking point if we attribute to a creature lacking brain, blood, sex, and even rectum any elaborate emotional or intellectual life, or any notable capacity for nostalgia. And yet Best and Rubinstein in the course of their tests of the planarian's capacity to learn came up with hard evidence concerning his capacity to remember. He "prefers" to eat in places where he has been before, although what he prefers or remembers with, I cannot say.

The experiment was as simple as it was conclusive. The worms were kept in glass bowls. A batch, to ensure a hearty appetite, was allowed to fast for three days. It was then divided into two groups. One group of worms, to be familiarized, was placed in a plastic receptacle without food for an hour and a half, then returned to its home bowl to go on being hungry for another half-hour. In this interval the receptacle was scoured and rinsed with hot water to remove any traces of spoor or identifiable remains. Now both groups, equally hungry, were placed in feeding receptacles with a proper dinner of chopped liver floating in water. One group had never been in its receptacle before; the other, of course, had had its ninety minutes of residence but because of the scouring was presented with no clues -- odors, tastes, landmarks -- by which the receptacle could be identified. Nevertheless, the worms of prior residence began eating on the average in twenty minutes, while the worms encountering their receptacle for the first time took forty-two. And when the experiment was repeated with fresh batches of worms denied food for six long days, the results were precisely the same: those familiar with the [102] dish took just half as long to start eating as those who had never been there before.

It is common knowledge that a dog enjoys eating in a customary place, and that many higher animals will eat better where they feel familiar. This is normally interpreted as anxiety and caution in a strange place, confidence and security in an accustomed one. But here we are dealing neither with long custom nor higher animals. What is the confidence that a planarian worm derives from a ninety-minute exposure to a plastic dish? And how does he know that he has been there before? And beyond all that, just what does he have to know with or feel confident with beyond two bumps on his symmetrical nerves?

There are ghosts in evolution's attic. A shutter slams on a windless night. There is a scraping sound above our heads, and with a considerable palpitation we move about our room, inspect the ceiling. The sound stops. A single step on the stairs outside gives a soft creak; then there is silence. We rush out the door. There is no one. Who was it? Where did he go?

Man is as invested by the unknown but measurable forces of the natural world as is the planarian worm. We are as haunted by old voices, as driven by old dictations, as contained by old and sometimes inappropriate regulations as is the cricket near his niche. And while it may seem an unlikely leap to fling ourselves from plastic dishes and numbered fish bowls to the modern farm, I believe that we shall recognize on its familiar acres those same ghostly, unfamiliar, uninstructed forces animating ourselves even as they animate the least among us.

A riddle of our times -- one far more agonizing to the Russians than to ourselves -- has been the collapse of Soviet agriculture. That the world's second most powerful nation, one fully capable of exploring the moon, should be unable to feed itself is a truth finding testament in every grain market in the world. Why? We have answers by the dozen, but in all their collected urgency they cannot, in my opinion, explain the calamity that has come to the collective way. We and the Russians and the Chinese too will understand, it, I maintain, only when we recognize that among the instruments of a successful modern farm -- among the fertilizers, the insecticides, the proper seed, the proper machinery, the proper know-how -- there stands an unseen tool. And that tool is the farmer's dedication to his work. No [103] profit motive can command it, for there are easier ways to become a millionaire. No appeals to a sense of duty can summon it forth, for there are shorter roads to the patriot's pedestal. The dedication must spring from within the man.

If we think back, we shall recall that farm and farmer j,ave been the central problem of civilization, even as they jiave been its central cause, ever since in neolithic times almost 10,000 years ago we began our domestication of plants and animals. Having gained control over an abundant food supply, we made possible populations of such number that the old hunting life could never again support us. We could not return. Like the beaver, we mastered a culture which in turn mastered us. Pasture and field, orchard and garden became like portions of our body, organs without which we could not exist. And like the beaver's dams and lodges and wooded acres, they commanded an intolerable lot of work.

Which of us from dawn to dark would bend in the rice paddies, cut hay in the fields? As the millennia progressed, we supplied many an ingenious answer. We tried at first to push the work off on our women, an answer favored in much of Africa even today. We tried human slavery, a solution respected throughout the civilized world until a century or so ago. We tried serfdom in many guises, chaining the worker to someone else's soil. But there was always a shortcoming: that the involuntary worker is inefficient.

Until the industrial revolution the inefficiency of our agriculture was of no alarming moment. So long as the slave in the field was pressed to feed only a handful of nobles and warriors and priests and artisans, involuntary labor was good enough. But with the rise of industry and the massive increase of a factory and office population, our old systems collapsed. Despite the most humane or brutal attentions of landlord and overseer, the involuntary worker in the field could not produce the surplus food which such populations required. Slavery and serfdom vanished. To whatever extent other forces, moral or political, may have caused the final dismissal of our ancient institutions, the first cause was that they no longer worked. And we turned, most of the world's peoples, to another old if less prevalent institution, the peasant family on its freehold.

It is an accident of history that in 1862 the American President, Abraham Lincoln, with his signature on the Homestead Act committed the American agricultural [104] future to the principle of private ownership based on a one-family unit, and that two years later Karl Marx with his call for Communism's First International committed what would someday be the Soviet Union to public ownership and the collective way. A giant race, of which we are almost as unaware today as we were then, was set in motion. As in two enormous living laboratories, the two human populations that would someday dominate the world's affairs were placed on opposite courses to solve a common problem. And that problem, in an industrial age, became in time the problem of all peoples the world around.

How many workers can be released to the wheel by a single man at a plow? As nations came to compete for power and prestige under the single racing flag of industrial worth, a stubborn equation of human mathematics came to limit their most splendid ambitions. What fraction of a people's numbers must remain in the field to free the remainder for the ultimate competition? And by what means may the energies of that farming fraction be so enhanced as to reduce its number to a minimum?

No argument exists -- certainly not in Moscow's Central Statistical Administration -- concerning the current state of the competition. In the United States of America one worker on a farm produces food for himself and for almost twelve more in the city; 92 percent of all Americans are freed for industry by a rural 8 percent who not only feed them but produce a food surplus of politically embarrassing dimensions. In the Soviet Union one worker in the field, but only in good years, feeds one worker in the factory. A doubtful half of the Russian population is freed from the soil. And as if to confirm the Soviet calamity, its major partner in the collective way, China, pursuing more extreme communal policies, must combine the efforts of six in the field to free one man for the industrial adventure.

China's pretensions to power are young, enveloped in a cloak of secrets, and cannot be inspected here. But the Soviet Union has been with us for almost half a century and makes no effort to hide or dismiss its failure. We know that many a blight besides proscription of private property has fallen on the Russian farm. Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks eliminated at an early date the ablest Russian farmers. The reign of Lysenko and his Lamarckian nostalgias all but annihilated Russia's science of plant genetics. Permafrost, that layer of permanently frozen earth underlying [105] so much of the broad Russian plain, has been less than helpful. Drought, combined with the blunder of putting to the plow so much virgin but marginal land, has enforced the disaster in recent years. And for decades there was the naive pressure to favor the factory over the field, to neglect fertilizers, farm machinery, irrigation.

Like Chekhov's man of two-and-twenty misfortunes, the Russian farmer has had his full share. But does the total misfortune explain in full the catastrophe which has come to Russian hopes? There, of course, lies the argument. And I submit that were the ratio between American and Russian effectiveness, as measured by this final yardstick, a matter of two to one or three to one, or even of four or five to one, then American wealth, soil, science, and luck might account for the difference. But that the American farmer can feed twelve men besides himself, whereas the Russian can feed only one, is a little too much. I submit that a final multiplication of natural American assets arises from the biological value of the pair territory.

The smallness of American farmers is among the best-kept secrets in the arsenal of American power. The Soviet Union's collective farms, in which workers shared until 1966 nothing but surplus earnings, average 15,000 acres, each with about 400 families. The state farm, hiring all workers at a fixed wage, averages 70,000 acres and employs 800 workers. Yet of America's two and one half million commercial farms, only one in ten is over 500 acres. The average number of workers, including the farmer and his sons if he has any, is five. Despite those advances in farm machinery which permit a worker to cultivate an acreage far greater than in Lincoln's day, still half of our farms are no larger now than then. The factory-in-the-field exists, but it is of minor significance. The American agricultural miracle has been produced by a man and his wife with a helper or two on a pair territory.

Many years ago I visited an enormous corporation cotton farm in California's Central Valley. Water was drawn from wells 2000 feet deep, each costing $65,000. The resident manager shrugged off the entire giant enterprise. "It's all the cost of the wells," he said. "A normal water supply, and this place would be subdivided tomorrow. Nobody can compete with a farmer on his one hundred and sixty acres." I had never heard of territory in those days, and I did not believe him. [106]

Much more recently I visited a kibbutz in Israel. The kibbutz is the only successful collective farm in the history of modern agriculture. I was skeptical: was it truly a success? Between Tel-Aviv and Haifa there is one of the oldest and most respected of Israeli kibbutzim, Gan Shmuel, the Garden of Samuel. Here 400 adults farm 1200 acres and in the year before my visit produced crops valued at about $1.5 million. The special circumstance of Israeli vision and dedication, and the special situation of their nation besieged, might account for the success; but that Gan Shmuel is a success is unarguable. Then, however, I visited a private farm on comparable land only a few miles away. Here a former Polish doctor and his son and their wives worked thirty acres. Productivity per acre was about the same as at the kibbutz, but I was struck by a difference. On the collective farm it would have required nine adults to work thirty acres; on the private farm it took only four. I inquired. The former Polish doctor stretched: "Well, they work eight hours a day."

One recalls the beaver and his saplings, and a vigilance concerning his dam that makes him so easily trapped. One recalls the parent robins gathering a thousand caterpillars a day. One recalls the platys and their duckweed, and the intruding cichlid fish who must be twice as big to challenge a proprietor. One recalls the planarian worm who will take twice as long to start feeding, despite all hunger, if his plate is unfamiliar. Are we to believe that a biological force, commanded by a sense of possession, which plays such a measurable role in the affairs of animals plays no part in the measurable discrepancies of man?

In any final inspection of the Soviet-American experiment with the territorial imperative one might thumb through statistics as dreary as they are endless to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the man who owns over that of the man who shares or works for wages. Some have their fascinations, such as that process called stock raising, in which availability of fertilizer and machinery and irrigation provide limited advantage. Yet to achieve a net gain of one hundred pounds in a walking unit of beef, the American farmer will expend three and one-half hours of labor, the wage worker on a Soviet state farm twenty-one, the sharing worker on a collective farm an impossible fifty-one. But it is a situation within the Soviet farm economy that provides the last garish touch. [107]

From the days of Stalin's enforced collectivization of the land, the peasant has been permitted to retain a tiny private plot for family cultivation. It is the last bedraggled remnant of the pair territory in the Soviet Union, and in times of political crisis and ideological pressure its size has been reduced. Today the private plot averages half an acre in size, but there is little likelihood of further reduction. Without it Russia would starve.

Private plots occupy about 3 percent of all Russian cultivated land, yet they produce almost half of all vegetables consumed, almost half of all milk and meat, three-quarters of all eggs, and two-thirds of that staff of Russian life, potatoes. After almost half a century the experiment with scientific socialism, despite all threats and despite all massacres, despite education and propaganda and appeals to patriotism, despite a police power and a political power ample, one would presume, to effect the total social conditioning of any being within its grasp, finds itself today at the mercy of an evolutionary fact of life: that man is a territorial animal.

Natural selection deals ruthlessly with any population, bird or beaver, which fails to solve the problems of its environment with all those resources, learned or unlearned, which may be at its disposal. It deals as ruthlessly with men. And in a time when we should like to pretend that natural selection no longer pertains to the human being, the most cynical observer must be moved by compassion for all those hundreds of millions of his fellow beings, in this earthly setting or that, who are being subjected to selection's surgery to prove that man is a being more ancient than all man's theories. But the evolutionary process grinds on, whatever our hopes or compassions, undeterred by tyranny, undeterred by dogma, undeterred by our most soaring excursions or delicate perfections of human self-delusion.

The territorial nature of man is genetic and ineradicable. We shall see, farther along in our inquiry, a larger and older demonstration of its powers in our devotion to country above even home. But as we watch the farmer going out to his barn with the sun not risen above the wood lot's fringe, We witness the answer to civilization's central problem which none but our evolutionary nature could provide. Here is man, like any other territorial animal, acting against his own interest: in the city he would still be sleeping, and [108] making more money too. What force other than territory's innate morality could so contain his dedications? But here also is the biological reward, that mysterious enhancement of energy and resolution -- territory's prime law and prime enigma -- which invests the proprietor on his own vested acres. We did not invent it. We cannot command it. Nor can we, not with all our policemen, permanently deny it. He who has will probably hold. We do not know why; it is simply so. It is a law that rings harshly in the contemporary ear, but this is a defect of the ear, not the law. I believe that we shall see, as this inquiry develops, that, harsh though the law may be, in this territorial species of which you and I are members it has been the source of all freedom, the curse on the despot, and the last desperate roadblock in the path of aggression's might.