t was the reformer, the social worker, and the
business man who compelled him to study the community.

The study of the community is still in its beginnings. Nevertheless,
there is already a rapidly growing literature on this topic.
Ethnologists have presented us with vivid and detailed pictures of
primitive communities as in McGee's _The Seri Indians_, Jenk's _The
Bontoc Igorot_, Rivers' _The Todas_. Studies of the village communities
of India, of Russia, and of early England have thrown new light upon the
territorial factor in the organization of societies.

More recently the impact of social problems has led to the intensive
study of modern communities. The monumental work of Charles Booth,
_Life and Labour of the People in London_, is a comprehensive
description of conditions of social life in terms of the community. In
the United States, interest in community study is chiefly represented by
the social-survey movement which received impetus from the Pittsburgh
Survey of 1907. For sociological research of greater promise than the
survey are the several monographs which seek to make a social analysis
of the community, as Williams, _An American Town_, or Galpin, _The
Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community_. With due recognition of
these auspicious beginnings, it must be confessed that there is no
volume upon human communities comparable with several works upon plant
and animal communities.

3. The Group as a Unit of Investigation

The study of societies is concerned primarily with types of social
organization and with attitudes and cultural elements embodied in them.
The survey of communities deals essentially with social situations and
the problems connected with them.

The study of social groups was a natural outgrowth of the study of the
individual. In order to understand the person it is necessary to
consider the group. Attention first turned to social institutions, then
to conflict groups, and finally to crowds and crowd influences.

Social institutions were naturally the first groups to be studied with
some degree of detachment. The work of ethnologists stimulated an
interest in social origins. Evolution, though at first a purely
biological conception, provoked inquiry into the historical development
of social structure. Differences in institutions in contemporary
societies led to comparative study. Critics of institutions, both
iconoclasts without and reformers within, forced a consideration of
the