the animal grows up, and are least of all in fully grown and
independent creatures of high intelligence.

Young animals born in captivity are no more easy to tame than those
which have been taken from the mother in her native haunts. If they
remain with the mother, they very often grow up even shyer and more
intolerant of man than the mothers themselves. There is no inherited
docility or tameness, and a general survey of the facts fully bears out
my belief that the process of taming is almost entirely a transference
to human beings of the confidence and affection that a young animal
would naturally give its mother. The process of domestication is
different, and requires breeding a race of animals in captivity for many
generations and gradually weeding out those in which youthful tameness
is replaced by the wild instinct of adult life, and so creating a strain
with new and abnormal instincts.

B. PLANT COMMUNITIES AND ANIMAL SOCIETIES

1. Plant Communities[84]

Certain species group themselves into natural associations, that is to
say, into communities which we meet with more or less frequently and
which exhibit the same combination of growth-forms and the same facies.
As examples in northern Europe may be cited a meadow with its grasses
and perennial herbs, or a beech forest with its beech trees and all the
species usually accompanying these. Species that form a community must
either practice the same economy, making approximately the same demands
on its environment (as regards nourishment, light, moisture, and so
forth), or one species present must be dependent for its existence upon
another species, sometimes to such an extent that the latter provides it
with what is necessary or even best suited to it (Oxalis Acetosella and
saprophytes which profit from the shade of the beech and from its humus
soil); a kind of symbiosis seems to prevail between such species. In
fact, one often finds, as in beech forests, that the plants growing
under the shade and protection of other species, and belonging to the
most diverse families, assume growth-forms that are very similar to one
another, but essentially different from those of the forest trees,
which, in their turn, often agree with one another.

The ecological analysis of a plant-community leads to the recognition of
the growth-forms composing it as its ultimate units. From what has just
been said in regard to growth-forms it follows that species of very
diverse physi