6. The Nation

Madagascar is evolution's liveliest museum. It is a chip off history, an enormous chip 1000 miles long floating in the Indian Ocean, 250 miles at its closest point from the southeast African coast. And deep though the sea may lie between them, Madagascar seems also to be a chip off the African continent that somehow came loose a very long time ago. Just how it came loose and wound up where it is -- whether it is a piece of flotsam left behind by the drifting of continents or whether it was a victim of local geologic grievance -- is a matter of some debate. It is one debate which hopefully we may stay out of.

Something happened to Madagascar; that we know. And it happened so cleanly, with such surgical purity, that it left Madagascar's inhabitants of the time all but untouched by subsequent world events. Lions and tigers and leopards and jaguars, wolves and jackals and coyotes have all [175] evolved since the ancient event; on Madagascar there are no large predators at all. Monkeys first appeared in the Oligocene, thirty or forty million years ago; though elsewhere they spread all over the Old and New Worlds, on Madagascar there are none. The most primitive apes that we have so far found laid down their bones in Egyptian fossil beds at an oasis near Cairo, Fayum. That was not too long after the monkey's appearance. Since then one ape or another, at one time or another, reached all of Africa, of temperate Europe and Asia, and penetrated as far as Indonesia where a last sad descendant, the orangutan, today hangs in trees like yesterday's oversized fruit and swings his way slowly, heavily toward extinction. But the ape did not reach the New World of the two Americas, and he did not reach Madagascar.

The green strip of sea was just too broad, like a moat forbidding the world's evolving zoo. Competition is an essential force in evolutionary progress -- competition within a species, competition between species, the competition of predator and prey. That effective moat, the strip of green sea called the Mozambique Channel, shielded Madagascar's early inhabitants from lethal competition with the world's evolving fangs and claws and brains and weapons, and from broader competition with all those teeming superior species which mammal vitality would so effectively bring forth. No elephants would ever march in silent single file through a Madagascar forest; no giraffes would peer down from spotted watchtowers, or goats from windy peaks; no zebras or other horses, no elands or other antelopes would ever graze the sunny pastures of the high pink plateaus. There is no sure evidence that man himself came to the enormous island until the time of Christ, and when he came it was not from Africa but from Indonesia, far beyond the Indian Ocean. Man did not arrive from nearby Africa until he came escorted by Arab slavers.

All -- men, zebras, elands, elephants, goats, giraffes, monkeys, apes, lions -- belonged to evolution's future when Madagascar put out to sea. And so it came about that a portion of the earth's surface was subtracted from the market place of mammalian competition. Here obsolete species could thrive like obsolete industries behind a tariff wall. Here in a lost world ancient creatures could feed and sleep, breed and survive, untroubled by the competition of any but each other. So it was with the true lemurs, [176] dawn creatures of our primate line, who fifty or sixty million years ago were either carried off to sea on Madagascar's broad back or else reached the island when access was still easy. Shielded by the moat, they survive today in thirty-nine species. Elsewhere they are fossils.

It is in this living museum that today's observer is privileged to look through time's long window at the beginnings of our kind. And he will make the astonishing discovery that the small-brained beings of our primate dawn were capable of every known form of territorial social life. There is the Lepilemur's noyau, the society held together by its inward antagonisms. There is the sifaka, and probably the indris, with family groups like those of the gibbon or callicebus, all defending pair territories. Almost surely, unless these species are exempt from the processes of population genetics, such hostile family groups are portions of larger noyaux, but we do not yet have the observations to confirm it. And finally there is the biological nation of the brown lemur, of the fulvus and the ringtail, in which a territorial society is integrated by its outward antagonisms.

The, biological nation, as I define it in this work, is a social group containing at least two mature males which holds as an exclusive possession a continuous area of space, which isolates itself from others of its kind through outward antagonism, and which through joint defense of its social territory achieves leadership, co-operation, and a capacity for concerted action. It does not matter too much whether such a nation be composed of twenty-five individuals or two hundred and fifty million. It does not matter too much whether we are considering the true lemur, the howling monkey, the smooth-billed ani, the Bushman band, the Greek city-state, or the United States of America. The social principle remains the same. And Madagascar's stunning truth is that the nation, this most advanced of human societies, one which we have always regarded as of human invention, was realized by creatures who have been elsewhere extinct for fifty million years and who were only beginning to explore the potentialities of the enlarged primate brain.

Let us examine the lemur and his nations. If the lemur was one of the first undoubted primates, he was a last indisputably pretty one. A few monkeys, like the colobus, are not too bad to look at; the gibbon is superb. But I [177] cannot believe that as a zoological group, men and monkeys and apes can regard ourselves as objects of beauty. It must be our consolation, I suppose, that when we were young we still had our looks. Lemur variegatus, the ruffed lemur, is one of the world's most beautiful animals. He comes in an assortment of colors, reds, blacks, and whites, and he will lie in the crotch of a tree peering down at you from a foxy face while his luxurious tail, as large as his body, hangs down beneath. L. catta, the classic ringtail of northern zoos, is as lively as he is exotic. Microcebus, the mouse lemur, is not as large as your hand, yet his huge, liquid, nocturnal eyes are among the most haunting in nature.

When I visited Madagascar I knew little about lemurs. Jean-Jacques Petter's comprehensive monograph L'Ecol-ogie et l'ethologie des lemuriens malgaches was not published until 1962. Petter and his wife work together, and we met later in Paris. He is with the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, she with the Faculte de Medicine. His work concerns behavior and environment, his wife's concerns physiology and anatomy. They are young, brilliantly trained. I do not often meet a physiologist with dimples, nor do I often meet a brace of scientists, one with the Christian name Jean-Jacques and the other Rosseau. Since my antipathy for the gentleman who gave us the noble savage must be counted as among my most impassioned possessions, the sound of the Petters' names took a little getting used to.

The significance of the Petters' studies, begun in 1957 and still in progress, rests on the lemur's relation to primate and thus human evolution. When the lemur thrived in Eocene times, fifty or sixty million years ago, he stood as a zoological halfway house between the monkey and ape and hominid to come and the ancestral mouse that we had been before. For tens of millions of years while reptiles still dominated the world's land surfaces, the tiny, developing, primitive mammal had kept himself quietly busy, like some subversive organization, substituting warm blood for cold, hair for scales, babies for eggs, turning out a new kind of teeth, a new arrangement of skeleton, and most definitely a new sort of brain. It was a long job assembling and integrating such unorthodox genetic accouterment. During the period he found it the better part of valor to [178] stay small, to stay out of sight, and preferably to stay home in the daytime. He lived in trees.

Along about eighty-odd million years ago, for reasons best known to themselves, the dominant reptiles died off in droves. It is a widely held misconception that they became too big for their own good; not all of the reptiles were of dinosaur proportions, and the little ones died off too. Also, a few stayed around -- crocodiles, lizards, turtles, snakes -- and did very well. For the most part, however, the world in all its wonder wore suddenly one huge vacancy sign to tempt the little fellow in the trees. If by chance the reptile had been tired and old, the mammal was neither.

The shrew is today's creature that most closely resembles this common ancestor of mice and men. He is of a once abundant group called insectivores, a few of which, like the hedgehog and mole, are still with us. Some believe that among the shrews one finds the earliest of primates; others disagree. The tarsier, once a common, nocturnal, arboreal, insect-devouring little creature is definitely of our line, but only one genus has escaped extinction. In general, all these early mammalian experiments have been replaced by their evolutionary betters, and it is only the lemur, sheltered on Madagascar, that presents us with a full-blown example of our primate beginnings.

We cannot, of course, be sure that the way of lemur life as we observe it today -- his societies of inward and outward antagonism, and his manners of amity or animosity which he presents to his fellows -- have not evolved on his island home since his separation from the wide lemur world. Anatomically, however, he has evolved very little. In Eocene times lemur species were spread throughout all the continents, and there is an extinct variety called Notharctus, found in middle Eocene fossil beds in Wyoming, that differs little from some of the more evolved species found today in Madagascar's forests. Our knowledge of the intimate relationship between body and behavior would justify speculation that his behavior has changed as little as his body. Even were this not so, we should still be justified in asserting that a primate which has not yet acquired significant assets of brain and learning capacity has been capable, nevertheless, of attaining a most sophisticated social life.

Bodily, the lemur is still the same zoological halfway house that he was when primate times were young. He [179] has immense nocturnal eyes left over from the reptilian days when you did not go out till dark. He has the round, alert ears, unlike monkey's or ape's, of use when you listen more than you watch. He has a long, pointed snout like a dog or a fox, from a time of dependence on the sense of smell, and he still has scent glands to mark territories and exclusive trees. His brain remains smaller than any monkey's. Fifty or sixty million years of life in Madagascar's noncompetitive museum have left almost no mark on him. So primitive does he remain that one might easily ask, Then why is he a primate? And the answer is: he has hands.

There is no touch more sensitive than that of a black lemur exploring the mysteries of your wife's Sicilian bag or enjoying the soft fascinations of a woolen sweater. He has lost all his claws except the one on his second toe, which he has kept around for scratching himself. His nails -- like ours and like those of his Eocene ancestors -- are flattened to protect sensitive finger pads. While his hand lacks the flexibility of ours and he is incapable of controlling his fingers individually as do we, it is a hand that in its freedom from distortion resembles more the human hand than does that of the ape.

It was this clawless hand, so well adapted to running and scampering along arboreal paths, that set the primate on a way distinct from the evolutionary roads of our fellow mammals. We acquired sensitivity, but we sacrificed our fighting claws. And so for claws we substituted wits. It was at this ancient crossroad that the lemur stood, deprived of his claws, endowed with primate sensitivity, but lacking the anatomical blessing of brain that would someday take the monkey down the way of wit.

Of the fifteen species of lemur studied by Jean-Jacques Petter on Madagascar, six seem not to have emerged from the time of the monsters when mammals kept out of sight. All are nocturnal, and only one is large. This is the aye-aye, strangest of all primates and among the strangest of all mammals. His scientific name is Daubentonia and he is close to extinction's edge. In 1957 Petter was able to find ten small populations in ten small groves on Madagascar's northeastern coast. Now one of the groves is gone, and so nine populations remain. So long as he lasts, however, the aye-aye stands as an example of how close lemurs come to that early moment of evolutionary divergence between the [180] potentials of the primate and the rodent. It is as if the aye-aye never quite made up his mind which way he was going. He lives off larvae found under bark or in the heart of sugarcane. For chiseling through bark he has typical gnawing rodent teeth, like the gopher or prairie dog. But his hand is the normal primate hand in every way but one. Like a weird deformity he has a middle finger very thin, very long. It is for extracting larvae from the hole that his rodent teeth have chiseled.

The other nocturnal species are small. Least of them and perhaps the most primitive is the mouse lemur, and his name recalls our early rodent affinity. He is so small that in the Petters' Paris laboratory several will jam themselves into a tin can to sleep, crowding so closely that nothing appears but eyes. It is not a society, but what Petter calls an effet de masse; in the wild they will lead solitary lives. And in one more respect these smallest of lemurs recall the rodent: all bear litters of two or three young after a very short period of gestation.

The nocturnal lemurs were the last primates to lead solitary lives. However it may be explained, of Petter's fifteen species, in the six yet clinging to the nocturnal way individuals are found usually alone. Even Lepilemur with his observable noyau defends a solitary territory. Yet of [181] the nine more evolved species that have moved out of the dark to accept diurnal life, all nine form co-operating groups. And while we may ask ourselves, Why did adaptation to the day command the formation of our earliest primate societies? there can be only one answer: that we do not know.

Whatever was the mysterious force of the light of day, it commanded not only the formation of social groups but a powerful attachment to territory. The sifaka is one of the largest and most common of the family, and in the same Ankarafansika forest where Petter defined the noyaux of Lepilemur he mapped the adjoining territories of fifteen sifaka groups. All, like the gibbon and callicebus, contain a male, a female, and immature young. They will defend their borders, which are clearly defined but which they seem reluctant to cross. On one occasion Petter was photographing a group on its territory. The sifakas retreated before him, growled, leaped from tree to tree. Then they became hesitant, for they were approaching their frontier. The boundary lay between two mango trees and the space was an easy leap. But none of the group would cross it. When Petter came too close for further toleration, they leaped over his head and vanished in the opposite direction into the territorial heartland.

It is in the group of species that zoologists call true lemurs that we find the first primate biological nations. And of the true lemurs the black, Lemur macaco, offers the greatest advantage for accurate observation. He does not live in forests as dense as does the fulvus, nor in a portion of Madagascar as difficult of access as does the ringtail. Most important of the black's advantages to the scientist, however, is sexual dimorphism. Only the male is black; females are brown. Even at a distance the make-up of a group can be spotted, and with that make-up its fairly sure identification. On the little island of Nosy-Komba off Madagascar's northwestern coast the Petters were enabled to settle down in unseemly scientific comfort to follow with confidence the relations of ten groups, to map their territories, and to assess activities and individual relationships within each troop.

The black lemur is about the size of a fairly large house cat. Eight, ten, or a dozen adults along with their young form a normal group. As in all lemurs, copulation takes place in a season of sexual heat, on Madagascar between [182] April and June in the southern autumn. Unlike the lower and more primitive nocturnal lemurs, however, the female bears one young at a time in the manner of monkeys and apes, but unlike the young of the higher primates, these offspring grow up fast. By six months of age they are independent; by a year a daughter, though not yet sexually mature, is difficult to tell from her mother as they sit side by side on a branch.

Within the group it is probably this freedom from long-dependent young that makes possible the mother's high social status. Sexual dimorphism revealed to Petter that as a group moves through its exclusive domain it will be more often than not a brown female that leads, with a black male in second position. Sexual dimorphism revealed also that while contact between hostile groups at a border may be made by the black males, it will usually be the brown females who open outright hostilities. In our first primate nations the female, touched lightly by household chores, seems to have been as willing to join the army as to run for president.

Border engagements on Nosy-Komba are run off without the clocklike regularity of Mason's callicebus in Colombia. They seem, however, to be equally stimulating, equally enraged, equally lacking in danger for the participants. And in the satisfying volume of noise produced they have of course the enormous advantage of involving so many more animals. It is a matter of interest, although probably not of significance, that whereas the small family parties of the sifaka avoid their boundaries and engage their neighbors only when necessary, the big groups of the black seek the periphery, challenge their neighbors, and precipitate conflict by purposeful intrusion.

Petter watched one border row so absorbing for its combatants that they forgot to take their normal midday siesta. It began late one morning when a male spotted across a boundary a male of a second group. They exchanged cries. They moved about until each had a good view of the other, then settled down to watching with intense mutual curiosity but little show of antagonism. Simply the sight of each other seemed to offer stimulation of sufficient reward. Then about two o'clock in the afternoon -- perhaps the first male had failed to answer some roll call -- two brown females from his group came leaping, clamoring through the trees. The racket roused two [183] females and a juvenile from the second group, who likewise came on the treetop run. Action broke loose. Females intruded from both sides. The row raised the total population of both clans, ten adults in the first, four in the unusually small second. As we might surmise, though, the disputes of animal nations are like those of pairs or individuals. Being outnumbered means as little as being outweighed.

For an hour the melee proceeded in all magnificence while males chased males or females without discrimination, and females shrieked and pursued females or males with equal belligerence. In the meantime, however, an odd thing had happened. The male of the first group who had started it all, and who had failed to report for roll call, quietly abstracted himself from the conflict, retired into safe territory, and, unmoved by the deafening shenanigans, proceeded to eat his dinner. At last, sometime after three in the afternoon, he was joined by his famished partners. By four o'clock the original troublemaker, refreshed, was off by himself exchanging cries with somebody over another boundary. But this was not the boundary of the small second group, and if it was his intention merely to gawk at a foreigner he was to be disappointed. Within minutes the entire third clan -- it consisted of ten adults, as numerous as the first -- was answering the alarums from the border by screaming through the treetops, a brown female in the lead, all following in single file about four yards apart. The half-fed first clan rose from its dinner and accepted the challenge. Again females led the charge. And again the male who kept starting things retired in all innocence to the peace of the heartland, there to comb out his fur with his little front teeth.

This was a party that lasted late, almost till dark. Then the exhausted clan made its way to the traditional sleeping place in the heartland, there to raise its blended voice in a customary cri du soir. From somewhere in the forest like an echo came the evening cry of the second clan, and from somewhere else the cry of the third. All flags were still there. The clan, one must assume, slept well, one member at least with a full stomach.

So it is that in a Madagascar forest, as in a museum case, the student of man is privileged to watch certain ways of man enacted in a lost little world of fifty million years ago. Here is the exclusive bit of space occupied by a group. [184] Here is the castle- -- the heartland, the sleeping place -- secure in its peace. Here is the border, where life is never dull. Over there -- and there and there -- are the enemies who from now to eternity may be relied upon to co-operate in our most exciting exercise. And here we are, in our society of outward antagonism, with no choice but to be friends.

It must be admitted, of course, that men have brought a few innovations to the original natural nation. That our nations are larger and far more complex are merely differences of degree. But that we tend to kill each other, and to take each other's land away, is quite something else. A lemur would be aghast at such behavior and would regard it as a violation of natural law.

We need not brood at the moment about our human innovations, for we are merely tracing the evolution of a biological institution, speculating as to its selective value, and striving to recognize that it is not something thought up by man. And it is sufficient to give ourselves over to wonder that at the primate dawn the basic outline of modern human society had appeared. Before monkeys were born, before the significant primate brain had more than begun to come into being; before there were leopards to haunt our nights or wolves to beset our days; before year-around sex had given us reason to enjoy and maintain year-around partnerships; before our children had become so slow to grow up that permanent societies were needed to protect them: before any such challenges or demands had entered primate circumstance, the lemur had emerged from the primordial mammalian night to establish that most sophisticated of social inventions, the nation.

We shall return again and again to the incisive studies of Jean-Jacques Petter, even as he and his wife return again and again to the old forests. There is a problem, of course. Lemurs are edible, and unprotected in Madagascar; men eat them. And the forest is vanishing. What the logic of nature had preserved for fifty million years the illogic of man has all but destroyed in less than two thousand. It is as if the two particular human populations who came to this island mingled more thoroughly than their genes their two worst ideas: The Asian brought from his homeland, along with his wheeled carts and gleaming paddy fields, a preoccupation with the next world so intense that he was careless about this one. And the African, far more concerned [185] with the traffic of this world, brought with him from his homeland a conviction that wealth and prestige are expressed by the number of cattle that a man owns, a conviction so intense that for a man to slaughter a beast except as ritual is to reduce his own size. The ideas dovetailed in that no one cared what happened to the land. And so today there are five million people and ten million cattle, and the cattle have eaten up the island. When you look down on Madagascar as you arrive from East Africa, before ever you set foot on the broad red soil, you will see that the forests are gone. It is an old, old, tired, worn land, bare and eroded, gullied and seamed like the face and head of an old, tired man.

It was very good fortune, under the circumstances, that the chip off Africa which put to sea was a chip so large. There are still little pockets of overlooked woodland where the black lemur lingers, and little nations gather with the falling dark to raise their voices in a cri du soir; to listen for echoes from distant trees confirming that their enemies are all in good health; to sleep in close comfort. And there are still a few tall stretches of forest inaccessible to cattle where patient men may observe the shy indris, most splendid of lemurs in his black-and-white robes, or may listen to his voice from some hidden place as he sings his sad, siren-like song. And there is the aye-aye, lingering on from the mammalian night, chiseling in the dark with his [186] rodent teeth, feeling for larvae with his middle finger, in a few last groves on the northeast coast; nine, if the Petters are correct.

The lemur did not invent the society of outward antagonism. He merely applied an ancient behavioral solution to the new primate problem of life in the light of day. To find its evolutionary origins one must go an astonishingly long way back.

Protozoa, as we all know, are one-celled creatures, and their history must date from the first billion years of emergent life. One kind of protozoa are known as slime molds. They are of the size and general appearance of a white blood cell, and they feed on bacteria such as one finds in moist soil. They divide every three or four hours, and so a population multiplies rapidly. Just about the time, however, when growing numbers have exhausted the food supply in a given area, the single-cell creatures enter the second phase of their life cycle. They begin to form societies. Around a founder cell others will bunch in a growing aggregate, clinging together until they have formed a sausage-shaped slug visible to the naked eye. Now this social slug of individual beings begins to behave as a single organism, and it will even move toward warmth or toward light with precision of direction. At last a portion of the community will differentiate themselves and form a stalk which they stiffen with a secretion. Then others will crawl on top of the stalk and form a sphere of cells each containing a spore, the seed of a new generation.

It sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is not. It is simply a way of life that was worked out a billion-odd years ago and that still works. How it works defies the imagination -- or, more accurately, gives some slight evidence as to how little we know about living processes. One aspect, however, of the social behavior of slime molds has yielded to laboratory investigation. It is whatl define as a society of outward antagonism founded on the defense of a social territory.

Investigators have been puzzling over the behavior of slime molds ever since their discovery in 1935. An American scientist began wondering if there could be some form of [187] communication between cells. Placed in a culture dish, they distributed themselves so evenly in their first phase of life that it seemed they repelled each other. (We should call it individual distance.) Then when the time came for aggregation, it was as if a new signal went out and all obeyed. An investigator named Arndt, working in Germany, made the striking observation that the number of fruiting societies in a given area was independent of the number of individuals. In other words, if you had a thousand protozoa in an area, they might form ten groups of a hundred each. But if you had ten thousand, they would still form ten groups. The societies were somehow a function of space, not numbers.

Only recently an American biologist, John Tyler Bonner of Princeton University, has demonstrated that in a given species of slime molds, the size of the social territory is a constant. And he has proved what had been suspected for some time, that the means of social defense is a gas which repels other groups to a given distance and at the same time attracts the clan. Charcoal absorbs gas. By placing charcoal in his culture, Bonner reduced territory size so that four times as many social aggregates crowded the area.

I do not happen to know of an earlier example of the society of outward antagonism, isolated and unified by the defense of a social territory. Ants and termites do something like it. Since early in the century, when the study of social insects was in high fashion, it has been known that every colony has its own peculiar odor, and that a worker, for example, returning to the wrong colony will be smelled by guards, recognized, and instantly attacked. It was thought for a while that the difference in odor might arise from different sources of food supply. Recently, however, a colleague of Wynne-Edwards at Aberdeen, D. I. Wallis, has shown that in ant colonies the familiar, attractive odor of a social partner and the strange, repellent odor of the foreigner must at least in part be genetically determined.

We must be always wary of conclusions drawn from the ways of the social insect, since their evolutionary track lies so far from ours. But when we find a familiar behavior pattern in a common ancestral type, the protozoa, a creature so remote, so lost in the tides of animate beginnings, then an honest man must take a deep breath and ask of himself, What came first, the cart or the horse? What ultimately preceded which, body or behavior? We know [188] today that it is a behavioral adaptation that as a rule precedes and gives selective value to bodily change. But has natural selection for two billion years chosen among increasingly complex anatomical possibilities to fulfill increasingly complex behavior patterns? Or did these complex patterns exist from the near-beginning in creatures so simple that they lacked any apparent anatomical structures to maintain them?

These are questions of philosophical note which before this inquiry closes we may perhaps be enabled to ask with sharper precision. In the meanwhile we must give our attention to a question of more immediate concern to the human circumstance: Why have students of men failed to gain from students of the animal any notion concerning the biological origins of the nation? When the true lemur, possessing nothing but the anatomical rudiments of our Eocene primate dawn, introduced a social organization which men in their time would so intricately explore, he was merely picking up a ticket written a billion or so years earlier by the brainless, nerveless, sexless, almost formless one-celled protozoa. It passes all logic to believe that if the society integrated by its outward antagonisms has a history so venerable in the transactions of animals, it could have no bearing on the passages of men. But the question, seemingly so innocent, directs an ultimate earthquake at the more inflexible structures of contemporary thought; and in all responsibility we must inform ourselves, as fully as the new biology at present permits us, concerning the implications of the social territory and the consequences which its discovery brought to the development of the territorial concept.

In early chapters I traced the ponderings of science from the days of Aristotle and Zeno down through Altum and Moffat and Howard to David Lack and his curiosity about the private territory as a reinforcement for the pair bond. In those years, however, we find few observations of any but birds. Eagles and falcons, robins and nightingales, moor hens and meadow warblers were the messengers to bring us word that between a living being and the space he occupies there is a mysterious tie beyond habit or mere familiarity. If our observations of territory were limited, it was because insects and birds, until the 1930's, were very nearly the only wild beings that man had ever studied. Territory [189] remained a form of behavior peculiar to the ornithologist's notebook.

There were exceptions, of course. In 1912 a French psychologist published his La Genese des instincts. From studies of laboratory rats Pierre Hachet-Souplet recorded a pessimistic conclusion that neither reason nor justice could ever contravene "la loi de territoire." I have in my notes no earlier speculation concerning territory and the human being. And one must wonder whether the French psychologist retained his pessimism when two years later the taxicabs of Paris headed for the Marne.

There was another remarkable study of a nonbird made so early that its significance was lost. A. S. Pearse of the University of Wisconsin spent years watching that unlikely animal, the fiddler crab, in such unlikely locations as Manila Bay, the Massachusetts coast, and the flooded mangrove swamps of Colombia. He published his observations in 1913, the year after Hachet-Souplet's. Half a century later his fiddler crabs may startle us; then, lacking frame of reference, they earned small attention.

The fiddler crab is a belligerent little animal who lives on the beach and digs burrows in the sand or mud. When high tide flows, he retreats into his burrow and plugs up the [190] opening. Pearse watched thirteen species and found the same behavior in all. Each individual lives his life near his burrow door, cleaning and scraping the sand about it. Seldom will he move more than a yard or two away, and Pearse established twelve yards as the roving limit. It is the smaller area only that he defends, however, and the fiddler will chase or fight off any intruder on his tiny estate. So vicious is his defense that if a crab is removed experimentally to any distance along a crowded beach, his return will be a harrowing affair. He must cross the territories of others, and he will be attacked by every crab along the way. The chances are better than fair that he will lose a claw, if not his life.

"Each fiddler's hand is against every man," wrote Pearse, and it is almost literally true. One claw of the fiddler is overdeveloped to huge size, sometimes a third of total body weight. This claw is called the chela. It is a brilliantly colored display object, and during the mating season, whenever a female passes, every male in the colony will stand by his burrow frantically waving his chela, often adding to the excitement by squatting and rising as he waves. Throughout the nonbreeding season, however, such diversion is lacking, and then the male fiddler crab finds other uses for his chela. David Lack concluded that fighting is what a robin likes best of all. So does the fiddler crab, but his fighting is highly formalized. Two will meet on a boundary and lock chelae precisely as two men shake hands. The object of the action is simplicity itself: by a sudden wrench, to break the other crab's claw off.

Ornithology was naturally unaware of Pearse's crabs, as it was unaware of the unreasonable rats in a Paris laboratory. Interpretations of territory continued to be based entirely on the behavior of birds. And the interpretations -- whether the food theory, or the dispersal of breeding pairs, or the natural selection of superior males, or reinforcement of the pair bond -- all referred to the competition of individual males and in one way or another to reproduction. But then, in 1934, the American zoologist G. K. Noble brought in the fence lizard and the upsetting news that the female has a territory of her own which she defends against all comers, including males. How such behavior promoted successful reproduction was hard to say.

Many years later the way of a female lizard would be explored in sharper detail by the young Rhodesian [191] all-around scientist C. K. Brain. In African Genesis I described the anthropological ingenuities which he applied to the australopithecines, the South African man-apes, and today he is curator of anthropology at South Africa's Transvaal Museum. But there was a period in Brain's career when he wearied of ancient dating, of the tools and fossil memories of small-brained protomen, and he turned to the Kalahari desert and the chameleon. I could understand his fascination, in a way. On one of his returns from the Kalahari he showed me among other lively reptile samples a creature as upsetting to a layman as is a female proprietor to bird-men. When you looked into one ear of the deplorable creature you saw daylight coming in the other.

The young Rhodesian's confirmation of Noble's observation concerned the female of a common chameleon species who defends a solitary property against all others, female or male, with such vigor as to raise the question, How does she ever mate? By experiment Brain found the answer. The male displays by puffing out his throat. On that throat is a yellow mark which serves to make the female only worse-tempered than ever. But when the sexual season comes around, the yellow fades. She admits him to her property, and they mate. Then the yellow mark returns and she throws him out.

Brain's detailed observations were unnecessary, thirty years earlier, to lend credibility to the fence lizard. G. Kingsley Noble was curator of experimental biology at the American Museum of Natural History and his authority could not be ignored. Ponderous questions were raised for which ornithology had no answer. The female fence lizard's territorial defense most definitely did not reinforce a pair bond, did not serve to select worthy from unworthy males, was not an expression of male sexual pugnacity, and could by no means be interpreted as protecting the welfare of offspring. Having laid her fertilized eggs, she would from that point on lose all interest in future generations. Then what was the selective value to the species? Brain's later demonstration showed that lizard territory could be definitely anti-sexual, since only by suspension of the behavior could mating take place.

The next non-bird man to complicate ornithology's interpretations was W. H. Burt, whose domain spread through the fields and the woodlands and the brushy river bottoms of southern Michigan, and whose castle was the [192] University of Michigan's zoology department. Burt watched rodents: wood mice, deer mice, pine voles and lemming voles, ground squirrels and flying squirrels, chipmunks. Although he left no book about them, Burt might almost be described as the Eliot Howard of the mouse world.

Rats and mice have always entered the literature of human analogy, and perhaps that is why with Burt's studies one entertains for the first time clear-cut statements of human implication. The bird inhabits the sky, and we do not tend to identify ourselves with a creature so disdainful of human limitation. Eliot Howard may have blurted to a servant girl that territory is everything; but he did not say it in public. The Michigan zoologist, however, did not hesitate to state his conviction that what was true of mice was true of men. Territory for a rodent meant security against the predator. When you live a life of marsh hawks and foxes, then the days will be fairest for those who know their homelands best.

The Muries, we may recall, had a six-week-old deer mouse who homed two miles to the area of her nest. Burt found similar capacities in wood mice. How they got home was as inexplicable as ever, but what they did when they got there was evident. They disappeared. On its own property a small rodent knows every hole, every tunnel, every hiding place. Burt found that a wood mouse released on its own territory would vanish within twenty feet.

Security from the predator is seldom a territorial function in the lives of birds. But in the lives of rodents as in the lives of men its value is universal. One's imagination may [193] spring to the fortified border, the castle, the drawbridge; to the walled town on an Italian hill; to the barrier of living thorns about an African kraal; to the ancestral cave. Or it may spring no farther than to the striving market place and the quiet chair by the fire. No thoughtful observer of the territorial ways of vulnerable man could fail to recognize in them the ways of the vulnerable wood mouse. I have no doubt but that Burt in his time was accused of anthropomorphism by devotees of human uniqueness wielding vocabularies more pretentious than precise. It is an anthropomorphism to attribute to the animal the capacities of man. What Burt was stating was quite the opposite, for he was attributing to man the capacities of the animal.

W. H. Burt was one of the most significant contributors to the concept of territory, and in another field he came into conflict with his contemporaries. A chipmunk, he noted, will vigorously drive away any intruder who comes within fifty yards of her nest. But she will forage for food for a hundred yards or more beyond, ignoring there the same intruder whom she drove away from her nest's vicinity. The defended area, said Burt, is the territory; the foraging area is the home range.

The distinction between territory and range met opposition, since it minimized the economic importance of territory. As we see in instance after instance, there is an allure about the economic principle as there is about the sexual principle, for each provides simple answers: that an answer may be untrue is less formidable than that it be complicated. Fortunately for Burt's distinction, a biologist named Kenneth Gordon was at about the same time watching golden-mantled ground squirrels in the Far West. At two widely separated locations, one in Oregon, one in Colorado, their territorial behavior was identical. A proprietor would chase an intruder for about one hundred feet. But he would forage for nuts and cones to a much greater distance, and there, like the Michigan chipmunks, he would ignore the same individual whom earlier he had pursued. Burt's distinction between range and territory prevailed, and is today accepted widely in science.

While W. H. Burt brought both cleaner definitions and broader horizons to the territorial concept, his rodents and Noble's lizards thoroughly messed up those simpler interpretations drawn only from the life of birds. One principle, however, seemed to remain intact: that whatever the [194] function territory may provide, it remains a competition between individuals and must somehow relate to individual selection. Then the American psychologist C. R. Carpenter returned from Panama with the news that howling monkeys defend as a group a social territory. The last principle was demolished. When five years later, in 1939, Noble at a symposium in Washington casually referred to a territory as "a defended area," biology leaped at the phrase. Problems of function and motivation were relegated to pigeonholes. From that day to this, biology as a whole asks but one question of a territory: is it defended? Defense defines it. Variability became the final description.

Ray Carpenter is a tall, quiet, scholarly man with a touch of Woodrow Wilson about him. And I should find it as difficult to visualize the late American President up to his armpits in an Asian swamp or ducking fecal matter showered down on him by large black belligerent monkeys in a Central American rain forest as I do this elegant academic gentleman in the bifocal glasses. Carpenter today is professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, and he lives in a low-flung modern house in a neighboring woodland alive with civilized squirrels and accustomed birds of soft-spoken manner. For a quarter of a century Carpenter's central preoccupation has been with university administration and the mental acrobatics of contemporary man. Yet for almost ten previous years his normal home was the jungle, his normal circle of acquaintance the jungle's temperamental citizens. A full quarter-century before Petter went to Madagascar, Carpenter went to Panama to initiate the modern study of primates in a state of nature.

At the time -- and it was not so very long ago, for I must recall that I myself had already completed my formal education -- there existed nowhere on earth a body of information acceptable to science which revealed the behavior of apes or monkeys in the wild. The amateur South African naturalist Eugene Marais had at the turn of the century lived for three years with a troop of baboons in the northern Transvaal, but his observations were regarded as unreliable and besides had not yet been translated from Afrikaans. Another South African, S. L. Zuckerman, had published his Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, and it was regarded as definitive. But according to the modern authority of K. R. L. Hall and Irven DeVore, Zuckerman's monumental [195] study had included but a few days of experience in the field, and had otherwise been based entirely on observations in the London zoo. In large part, what science knew about the behavior of primates, that zoological family of which we are a part, had been obtained in zoos and laboratories. Under such conditions, so little did the behavior of apes and monkeys resemble our own that we came to the logical conclusion that the human way was of our own making and owed little to animal inheritance. Schools of psychology were set in motion to explain our nature in terms of the conditioned reflex. Trends in anthropology and the social sciences went their cultural or environmentalist ways. Then in 1934 Carpenter made his first return to civilization bearing under his arm a clap of thunder: our information was false.

For two years the American psychologist had been watching howling monkeys on an island in the Panama Canal's Gatun Lake. Barro Colorado Island is almost 4000 acres in extent, and at the time of Carpenter's study it was divided between twenty-eight clans, each defending a social territory and living in total hostility with its neighbors. Only three clans were so small as to include but a single mature male; in all others the males ranged from two to five and the females from two to ten. Carpenter recorded their sexual relations and the care of their young, their social organization and means of communication, and their remarkable systems of group territorial defense. The sum he published in his classic monograph Behavior and Social Relations of the Howling Monkey.

The first of those assumptions which his study demolished was the scientific idee fixe -- one of such influence on the work of Sigmund Freud -- that the primate is obsessed with sex and that it is sexual attraction which holds primate troops together. The assumption of a sexual obsession had offered scientific justification for the romantic tenet that love is all, for the psychological tenet that sexual energy is the fuel of the human mechanism, and for the more everyday conclusion that when you come down to it nothing matters much except fornication. The assumption that sexual attraction is the magnet drawing together the adults of a primate society had consequences even more far-reaching: Since human society is most obviously not held together by such a sexual magnet, then our forms of social life must be unique to man, created by man, and [196] subject entirely to human manipulation according to our vision of human good. Anything, in a word, is possible. This is the premise of most contemporary sociology. It is also the premise that left the social sciences without other than sentimental defense against such totalitarian glimpses of the human good as fascism and communism. If anything was possible, then these were too.

The sexual assumption lies today in ruins. Mason's study of the callicebus shows the year-around integrity of the family group except during the sexual season. Petter's ancient lemurs, unlike most of the later monkeys and apes, retain the general mammal characteristic of seasonal heat and rut; yet their societies show an all-season solidarity. The same has been shown for the rhesus and the related Japanese monkey. Recent studies of less seasonal primates like the gorilla, the baboon, and the chimpanzee offer not a gleam of evidence to support the obsolete assumption that sex is the central preoccupation of the primate and the central force holding together his society. Yet that obsolete assumption remains today the cornerstone of most psychology, most anthropology, and very nearly all of sociology.

The assumption was, of course, rendered obsolete in 1934 by Carpenter's observations of the howling monkey. But he went further to demonstrate that it is the troop itself which is the focus of primate life. In his howler clans sexual jealousy was nonexistent. No male asserted a sexual monopoly over females, and sexual activity was an amiable entertainment in which all males shared all females. But the troop was another matter. No jealousy, neglect of young, defiance of leadership or failure of communication could exist at the cost of the clan's welfare. Years later S. L. Washburn and Irven DeVore would record that a baboon without its troop is a dead baboon. So it was with Carpenter's howlers. On rare occasions he spotted a solitary male in the forest. But the wandering male was usually one who out of persistent conflict with his fellow males had elected to leave his clan. Someday after further persistent efforts he would join another clan, or failing, he would die alone. Few so failed. A howler without a clan is a man without a country, and what is true of men and howlers is universally true of primate species.

Finally, Carpenter's careful observations showed that the mechanism isolating and integrating the howler clan [197] is its defense of a social territory. The territories of the callicebus, the sifaka, the black lemur are small, the borders cleanly delimited. The territories of howler clans are large, the borders vague. But clans have only to sight each other in this no man's land and total warfare breaks out. Rage shakes the forest. That rage, however, takes none but vocal expression. As I mentioned in the first chapter, the howler is equipped with a voice box of dismaying dimension from which emerge cries of discouraging proportion. Black lemurs raise their voices in unison in their cri du soir; howler clans raise their deafening voices both morning and night as a warning against intruders. Should intrusion occur, these voices joined will be the artillery of battle. And strictly in accord with the territorial principle, the home team will always win, the visiting team will always withdraw.

The howler clan is what I should call a society of most perfect outward antagonism which has achieved a most perfect inward amity. So different from the noyau, the biological nation spends its aggressive energies on enemies foreign, wastes none on enemies domestic. Within the howler society as within the society of the black lemur there reigns a kind of democratic tranquillity. Leadership is present, but authority is restrained. Differences of opinion are settled with a mumble and a grunt. While the female is never dominant, still her status is remarkably high. And as for offspring, they are the joint responsibility of all adults in the troop. All males, in response to a [198] special cry, will go to the rescue of a young one who falls from a tree; all males with concerted action will defend it against the advance of a predator.

Such observations were impossible so long as we drew our conclusions from the behavior of animals in the zoo. There no natural society is possible. There no fear of the predator, no pressure of hunger, no boundary disputes with neighboring bands, not even the inconveniences of bad weather can absorb primate energy. If he seems absorbed by sex, it is simply because his captive life presents him with no other outlet for his energies. Our conclusions concerning the nature of the primate, from which we came to such dubious conclusions concerning the nature of man, were based on the behavior of bored, deprived, essentially neurotic animals. Carpenter presented a preliminary review of his new findings at a meeting in 1933. "You're wrong," said a dominant figure in the old biology. "I've only reported what I saw," said Carpenter. "Then you've seen wrong," said the dominant biologist.

Carpenter went back to his rain forests. In succeeding years he added major studies of that small, lithe ape, the gibbon, in Thailand, and of the rhesus monkey both in India and in a free-ranging colony which he established on an island off Puerto Rico, together with lesser studies of the red spider monkey in Panama and of that great ape, the orangutan, in Sumatra. Through the mass and variety of his experience he established standardized, objective, quantitative techniques for the difficult task of observing and recording the behavior of animals in a state of nature. In a sense he imposed the mathematics of the laboratory on the confusion of the jungle, and there are few studies made in the wild today that do not in part found their techniques on those established by Carpenter in the 1930's.

The ultimate importance of his work, of course, was less to the natural sciences than to the social sciences, less to the study of the animal than to the study of man. More recent observation might reveal primate species integrated by other than the social territory. More recent studies might reveal species in which social amity is far less perfect than is achieved by the howling monkey or the gibbon. But Carpenter's discoveries bridged the unbridged gap between man and his primate cousins, and made not only possible but compulsory a consideration of all animate life as an evolutionary whole. [199]

What then was the impact of his discoveries on world science and world thought? The impact may be summarized briefly.

The studies were completed about 1940. When I published African Genesis in 1961, all were out of print, some could be obtained in specialized libraries such as those of the British Museum, several existed only as single remaining copies in a file at Carpenter's home. All since, it is pleasant to note, have been reprinted in a single volume, Naturalistic Behavior of Nonhuman Primates, by the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Among students of animal behavior, W. C. Allee was one who immediately grasped the whole significance of Carpenter's work, and in his article on animal sociology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica he discusses it at length. Little other discussion appeared, however, in reference works available to the layman.

Anyone would assume that political scientists, confronted as they are with nations and nationalism, with inspiring dreams of world federation and with the less inspiring agonies of the United Nations, would find among their numbers at least a few crackpot souls for whom the animal's social territory carries significance. If there exists such a political scientist, then I admire him. I happen myself to be unaware that the nation as a biological expression has ever entered our lengthiest debates.

One would assume likewise that anthropology, the science of man, would have been revolutionized by Carpenter's findings. For Sir Arthur Keith, anthropology's most famous figure and one of the founders of the science, such a revolution came about. We shall return to Keith later. It is sufficient here to note that when in 1948, at the age of eighty-two, he published his masterwork, A New Theory of Human Evolution, he recorded that Carpenter's social territory had been a catalyst for his thinking. The book exists, however, virtually unread.

There are certain anthropologists who in the past few years have found new inspiration in ethology's investigations of animal behavior and paleontology's startling illuminations cast on the human emergence. It would be an exaggeration, though, to state that the name of C. R. Carpenter had made deep inroads on the science as a whole. In 1965, for example, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists held its annual meeting at Carpenter's [200] home university. An official report of the conference was written by an anthropologist from the neighboring University of Pennsylvania and published in Science, the organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Passing reference was made to the address on primate behavior delivered at the annual dinner by "Clarence S. Carpenter."

Within the specialized, developing field of ethology, of course, Carpenter's name correctly spelled traveled far. But even there something was strangely missing. When in 1960 I was completing field and reference research for my own book, I faced a mystifying absence of further material on wild primates. Niels Bolwig, the previous year, had published observations of chacma baboons drawn to the garbage pails of a camp in South Africa's Kruger Park. The conditions seemed to me artificial. A Japanese group had begun observations of semi-wild macaques frequenting traditional temple areas, but their preliminary reports had not come my way. For lack of further material I made a wrong guess or two: I underrated primate social ingenuity and presumed that he would always found his society on territory; and I overrated the probable importance of the family as his social building block.

While I was finishing my work, the vanguard of a new generation of primate students was already at theirs. Petter was in Madagascar, K. R. L. Hall in the Cape of Good Hope watching baboons, George Schaller was in the high mists of Congo volcanoes with his mountain gorillas, Jane Goodall was beginning her observations of the savannah chimpanzee near Lake Tanganyika, Adriaan Kortlandt his of forest chimpanzees lingering near a Congo plantation. The following year, too late for my book, Washburn and DeVore gave us the first of the new publications, their superb account of the social life of the baboon. But this was simply the opening wave; then came the flood: K. R. L. Hall on the patas monkey as well as the baboon, Schaller on the orangutan as well as the gorilla, Stuart A. Altmann on the rhesus in Puerto Rico, Charles H. Southwick on the rhesus in India, Stephen Gartlan as well as Brain on vervet monkeys, V. Reynolds on the forest chimp, H. Kummer and F. Kurt on the hamadryas baboon, Mason on the callicebus, Phyllis Jay on langurs, Ellefson on the gibbon in Malaya. Today, one suspects, there must be hardly a bush or a clump of vines that does not shelter a scientist, or a [201] monkey or ape who is not busily engaged in making notes on the remarkable behavior of man.

The primate, in a scientific twinkling, became fashionable. And we may hold the legitimate suspicion, I believe, that a turn so world-wide, so spontaneous, so spectacular, has registered like a fever thermometer some change in the public temper. Monkeys and apes are the most controversial of animals, suffering as they do the misfortune of being closely related to man. And when men abruptly embrace them -- it is a guess -- we are seeing the first step of a rebellion, probably as yet unconscious, some first symptom of a profound dissatisfaction with all the old answers.

We shall be unwise, however, if we forget that twenty years earlier, when Ray Carpenter last emerged from the rain forest, no scientist took his place beneath the trees. He brought drama, but he played to an empty house. To believe that the sciences are rigidly objective and unswayed by the winds of intellectual fashion, of public mood, of political temper, of personal prejudice, is to go forth into the human storm clad only in trust's most innocent winding sheet. To believe that a scientist is unaffected by public disapproval, unaffected by the regard or disregard of professional colleagues, unaffected by the lack or abundance of funds for his work, is to characterize the scientist as an unperson. We, the laymen of the world, provide the milieu from which the scientist must draw his sustaining breath. You and I, we laymen, provide the freedom and the [202] inhibitions, the receptivity and the intolerance, the affluence and the poverty, the honors and the oblivion which direct our sciences toward this goal, dissuade them from that. And it was you and I, whether we knew it or not, who in the critical year of 1940 and the decades thereafter failed to encourage our sciences to investigate further certain possibilities perhaps remote: that man and the monkey have more in common than mere anatomy; that our infant species is not as yet divorced from evolutionary processes; that nations, human as well as animal, obey the laws of the territorial imperative.

It has been an expensive failure.

An effective social organization in primate groups will be achieved through territory, or it will be achieved through tyranny. Contemporary research has revealed no third way.

When some years ago I first read Tinbergen's The Study of Instinct I regarded as absurd his view that a social instinct does not exist. For generations we have accepted the notion of a gregarious instinct in social beings, and we have referred to the herd and the animal horde with a rough assessment that such groups are simply agglomerations of individuals drawn together by gregariousness. In later decades we have been presented with the alternative thesis that the primate group is drawn together by sexual attraction, but we are seeing that leaky vessel sink. What then could account for the universal primate society but a social instinct?

Happily for me, I faced no need to record publicly my conflict with Tinbergen's view, this is one sin for which I need not seek the confession box. But I was undoubtedly wrong. The mass of information which has come our way since 1961 indicates to me that if a social instinct is a portion of primate endowment, then it is a very small candle on a very dark night. We face a need for society. From the true lemur to true man, we have been creatures who combined a generalized body -- one lacking armor or significant armament, massive strength or dazzling speed -- with a single specialized asset, an increasingly better brain. For a creature as vulnerable as ourselves, there was no [203] evolutionary road other than to join forces and out of an effective union of bodies and wits to make the best of what we had. The animal cannot stand alone: no zoological group has endorsed the statement with a more fervent amen than has the primate. The combination of a generalized, all-purpose, but vulnerable body, a better brain tracked by more open instincts and wider capacity for learning, and a co-operating society which could enhance the powers of both brain and body, has been the holy trinity of primate success. And yet, after sixty-odd million years of evolutionary trial and error, the fellow seems to have developed nothing but the most unholy skepticism concerning the arrangement. For nature to induce a primate to assume any but an anti-social posture he must be tempted, stimulated, cajoled, tricked, threatened, terrified, and if necessary hit over the head.

How then is the essential society to be formed if the primate in his heart of hearts wants no part of it? It was George Schaller who once suggested to me that the only safe generalization to be made about the societies of monkeys and apes is that the primate has tried everything. And it is true. Out of our filling bag of primate observation, swollen so rapidly by the new studies, we may select examples of every conceivable social form: There is the biological nation of the howler, realized in its earliest form by the true lemurs, in which inward amity and co-operation is achieved through outward antagonism and to which strength is lent through the normal channels of territorial possession. Going down the scale in social number we find the patas monkey, living in fairly large groups but containing only a single, large, dominant male and his harem of females. The patas is one of the few known primate species with polygamous households. The wives may number up to a dozen, but the group is intensely territorial, and inward amity and co-operation are as perfect as in the biological nation. Still smaller territorial societies are those of monogamous, one-family units such as the callicebus, the gibbon, and the early sifaka, all of which we have examined. All defend territory, maintain inward amity through outward animosity, and secure cooperation in a voluntary manner. Seldom is it necessary for leadership to use force; relations between male and female are tranquil; conflict occurs occasionally, but usually between adults and maturing juveniles. [204]

At the opposite end of the social spectrum is the society of compulsion, owing no part of its structure to the organizing force of outward antagonism. Of these species, the only one which neither defends territory nor shows attachment to an exclusive range is the wandering, submissive, inoffensive, vanishing gorilla. His bands may be large, containing as many as nine mature males, but the band is ruled with total authority by a single chief. It is a benevolent despotism, in which there is rarely conflict because the will of the leader is never challenged. In the aggressive baboon, on the other hand, we find the harshest of all primate authorities. The large baboon troop with numbers of up to a hundred occupies a huge, permanent range which is exclusive in that none ever intrudes. Lacking challenge, the range is undefended and the resident troop gains no organization from concerted defense and outward antagonism. All co-operation rests on fear of an oligarchy of three, four, or five powerful males among whom there is amity, and whose combined dominance none dares challenge. It is an authoritarian society of compulsion and compliance, threat and punishment. Japanese monkeys form similar unchallengeable oligarchies, as does the African vervet monkey under special conditions. All, whatever the degree of force which dominant animals must exert on the subordinate, are essential tyrannies; and all are non-territorial in that none spend their energies on or gain cooperation from joint defense.

Between the two extremes lie species which maintain distance between groups, in which the effect is the same as that of individual distance. The exclusive area occupied by a group shifts as it gives way to the pressures of stronger groups. Outward antagonism may be extreme, as in the rhesus, or less demonstrated, as in the langur, but the antagonism springs not so much from the defense of an area of space as from defense of society itself. And, significantly, strong dominant orders based more on threat than punishment are necessary to the social organization.

The primate has indeed tried everything. There is even the amiable chimpanzee who seems to found his society on nothing very much but his own good nature. There is an order of dominance, but it is not at all severe. When band meets band in the forest or on the savannah, there is enormous excitement but no antagonism, and all may wind up feeding in the same trees. The chimpanzee has [205] demonstrated, I presume, that we must reckon on some degree of innate amity in the primate potential; but as I have indicated, it is a very small candle on a very dark night. The chimp is the only primate who has achieved that arcadian existence of primal innocence which we once believed was the paradise that man had somehow lost. And the achievement offers small promise for chimpanzee survival. We may deplore baboon tyranny, with its gang of thugs at the top; but the baboon is nevertheless an outrageous evolutionary success from the Sudan to the Cape of Good Hope; and the effectiveness of his society has made him the equal of the leopard and very nearly of man. The chimp, in contrast, despite his intelligence and strength, is confined to a few remote, diminishing African places. The troop is incapable of concerted action. If an individual senses danger, then a forest chimp will hide himself before giving a cry of alarm; the savannah chimp will give none at all, leaving his partners to look out for themselves. The amiable, otherwise admirable animal is an evolutionary failure. Second-most intelligent of all the world's beings, either he has lost the capacity for social effectiveness or he never gained it, and as purple night, black night steals through his forest galleries he makes his nest by a guttering candle.

If the primate has tried everything, there are still two generalizations which I believe one can make: There is not a species defending territory which is in the least danger of extinction. And there is not a species gaining outward antagonism through territorial defense which gains inward cooperation through compulsion. Dominance and subordination characterize all animal societies with the possible exception of certain schooling fish. Ethologists refer to these orders of dominance as hierarchies of low or high gradient. Barnyard hens, for example, have the well-known pecking order in which alpha may peck beta but beta may not peck back and if upset about the altercation must go and find gamma and peck her. This is an order of high gradient, as is the baboons'. But while future primate studies may present us with exceptions, on the basis of our present knowledge I believe it is safe to state that through a wide variety of effective primate societies a clean line falls: territorial societies tend toward the equalitarian, exhibit the lowest gradients of dominance, present the fewest examples of physical conflict or punishment, and while [206] attaining a maximum of social solidarity and co-operation, sacrifice a minimum of what a human being would call personal freedom.

The status of the female offers an excellent contrast of freedom and oppressiveness in primate groups. We have seen that in territorial lemur groups, like the sifaka and the black lemur, a female may even be the leader. But those were the days before melancholy fortune burdened the primate with children who take forever to grow up; the evolutionary advance may have been of intellectual advantage to primate potentiality as a whole, but it reduced the primate mother to the status of a second-rate citizen. In every species of monkey and ape she is subordinate to all mature males, and in most species sexual dimorphism has made her smaller, too, and quite defenseless. How then does she fare in her subordinate role?

There is not, so far as we know today, a territorial species in which the female is abused. Among his howler clans Carpenter never witnessed an instance of male aggression directed at a female, nor did he ever examine the body of a female which bore scars of punishment. Neither do females suffer from quarrels with each other; the amity prevailing within the female group of a clan extends even to that time when one is in estrus and seeking male attention. Ronald Hall, on the other hand, found that in his troops of chacma baboons in the Cape of Good Hope two-thirds of all acts of aggression were committed by females against females, and that over one-half of all acts of punishment delivered by the dominant males fell on the females.

An even cleaner contrast is offered by the patas monkey, studied by Hall in northern Uganda, and the hamadryas baboon, studied by Kurt and Kummer in Ethiopia. The male hamadryas is the big, maned animal, seen frequently in zoos, which once was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. The male patas is a lean, rangy, handsome creature, swiftest-running of all monkeys, whose speed has been clocked at thirty miles an hour. Both species are terrestrial. Both live in the same kind of country, open savannah broken by clumps of trees. Both form polygamous societies in which a large, highly dominant male has a harem of females. But there the similarity ends. The patas is intensely territorial, the hamadryas not at all.

A patas group controls an area as large as a dozen [207] square miles, moving rapidly about its estate. Most of the overlord's energy seems devoted to sentry duty as he watches for predators or other patas monkeys. If it is a predator, his movements will be instant and spectacular to draw attention to himself while his females hide; if it is an intruding patas, then he and his entire harem will join in a dizzy chase. And within this society of outward antagonism, as in the howler clan, peace is unbroken. Though the male have ten or a dozen wives, within the female group all is harmony. He may on rare occasion threaten a female, but there is never physical aggression. Neither are there vocal disputes; the patas is the most silent of monkeys.

The household of the hamadryas, in contrast, is a regime of fear. Whereas the patas male watches always for enemies, the hamadryas male watches always his wives. They sleep at night in a tight group, move in the daytime in a tight group ignoring all others of their species. Seldom will a female stray ten feet from her overlord. Should one stray farther, he will leap at her in instant attack, biting her neck, although this is frequently unnecessary. As a rule he has only to lift his great, maned head and point his dog-like snout at her. She will leap to his side, screaming in terror.

As Darling found two ways to live, to defy or to defer, so the primates have found two ways to attain that organized effort essential to their survival: through tyranny, whether by force or by compliance, and through territory and a voluntary association of partners for whom equal siege brings closer equality of status, and with it something resembling the personal dignity which man so prizes. But man has improved little on the social mechanisms of forest and bush, other than their complexity. We too have our subsidiary network of relationships within our societies: male and female, male and male, female and female, mother and infant, the young and his peers. As in every society of monkey and ape, we suffer our most serious conflicts between adult and adolescent. All these relationships we shall explore someday when, making full use of the treasure of primate information now coming our way, we turn our attention to society as an evolutionary mechanism.

A wonder of nature, mystifying and beyond all easy answer, is that the biological nation immediately appeared when true lemurs emerged from the long mammalian [208] night. Could we only know better the animal psyche, we might find that terror of the day and subconscious remembrance of the monster combined to command the most perfect of primate defensive weapons though real need was lacking in a time before leopards were born. Could such a thesis be a subject for demonstration, we might know ourselves better. In strict truth, however, the vulnerable hominid in his long evolution on the African savannah faced in shuddering reality the terror of night as well as day; and when true man emerged from the hominid shadow, he had no need for subconscious recollection of monsters. We clung to and perfected further that most effective of defensive weapons to be found in our primate legacy; for the monster was within us.