ch as is met with in some animal communities, nor are they in any way
specially adapted to act as guardians against a common foe. In the
plant-community egoism reigns supreme. The plant-community has no higher
units or personages in the sense employed in connection with human
communities, which have their own organizations and their members
co-operating, as prescribed by law, for the common good. In
plant-communities there is, it is true, often (or always) a certain
natural dependence or reciprocal influence of many species upon one
another; they give rise to definite organized units of a higher order;
but there is no thorough or organized division of labor such as is met
with in human and animal communities, where certain individuals or
groups of individuals work as organs, in the wide sense of the term, for
the benefit of the whole community.

Woodhead has suggested the term _complementary association_ to denote a
community of species that live together in harmony, because their
rhizomes occupy different depths in the soil; for example, he described
an "association" in which Holcus mollis is the "surface plant," Pteris
aquilina has deeper-seated rhizomes, and Scilla festalis buries its
bulbs at the greatest depth. The photophilous parts of these plants are
"seasonably complementary." The opposite extreme is provided by
_competitive associations_, composed of species that are battling with
each other.

2. Ant Society[85]

There is certainly a striking parallelism between the development of
human and ant societies. Some anthropologists, like Topinard,
distinguish in the development of human societies six different types or
stages, designated as the hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial,
industrial, and intellectual. The ants show stages corresponding to the
first three of these, as Lubbock has remarked.

Some species, such as _Formica fusca_, live principally on the
produce of the chase; for though they feed partially on the
honey-dew of aphids, they have not domesticated these insects.
These ants probably retain the habits once common to all ants.
They resemble the lower races of men, who subsist mainly by
hunting. Like them they frequent woods and wilds, live in
comparatively small communities, as the instincts of collective
action are but little developed among them. They hunt singly,
and their battles are single combats, like those of Homeric
heroes. Suc