5. The Noyau

Antagonism must have some value to living things: why otherwise would evolution have tolerated so much ot it.

In 1925 when the territorial concept was still a young and budding thing, two young and budding scientists went to Holland, pitched their tents on the island of Texel, and went to work on the black-tailed godwit. One was Julian Huxley, then a professor of zoology at Kings College in London, who for the next four decades would be a world figure in biology. The other was Ashley Montagu, then a student at Oxford, who would become in the same period a world figure in anthropology. The two published their [145] study the following year, and it is a pity today to find it so forgotten. It was a thing of beauty and insight, touched by intellectual breezes as fresh as a North Sea beach.

Huxley and Montagu in that single paper pioneered several notions. The black-tailed godwit is a wading bird, a handsome creature related to the curlew, the sandpiper, and our friend the ruff who falls on his face when the hen chooses somebody else. Godwits are migratory birds who arrive on the Dutch coast in March, frequently already paired. The pair together seizes a territory in the breeding area and defends it. Their action suggested to the two young scientists that if the two together seize a property, then in the case of the black-tailed godwit territory can have nothing to do with selection of mates.

These were very early years in the development of the territorial concept, and there was still little to go on but the conclusions of Eliot Howard himself. Huxley was a friend of Howard's, but he and Montagu went on to show that control of food supply can have little to do with the territorial animosities of colonial birds. The gull, the tern, the black-tailed godwit will defend a territory as small as two feet in diameter just as vigorously as will a warbler a much larger area. Howard had recognized this, but had felt that, in one way or another, food supply for the family must enter into the territorial function, and that the size of the colony itself must be related to total available food. Huxley and Montagu doubted the interpretation, for many colonies were small and the sea was large. Why then did sea birds nest in colonies at all?

It is a question of importance to this chapter, for we shall be gradually moving from the relation of territory to the individual toward its relation to society and the total population. We have seen enough of such phenomena as homing, the pair territory, and the behavior of the arena to grasp the basic territorial principle in its adjustment of the individual to the demands of the population and the species: what I have described as the innate enforcement of a biological morality. Now, if we are to approach a general application of the territorial principle to the condition of man, we must come also to understand the ways in which territory may be related to the formation and perpetuation of society itself.

Why are there species who insist on nesting or living the year around in colonies so dense that individuals or [146] pairs quarrel constantly over space? Why don't they spread out? Huxley and Montagu brought up a question in 1925 for which there is no agreed answer even today. "It is safe to say," they wrote, "that this disposition to resent intrusion into an area is almost universal and certainly primitive and normal among birds." They accepted the territorial principle as the cause of the quarreling, but they could not explain why the birds came together.

We shall return to this. But another salient point they pioneered we should inspect in passing. Huxley and Montagu recorded a form of behavior that would not receive a name, let alone further observation, for almost another twenty years. Black-headed gulls also nested on Texel Island in large colonies each divided into tiny hostile territories. They noticed that in this species a pair of gulls would resent the approach of a nearby pair even off in the grassfields where no property rights were involved. It was as if an invisible, movable fence encircled each feeding pair at an invariable distance. Let another pair come close and it would be chased away. "An apparent territorial instinct may be seen," they wrote, "even in cases where true territory is not involved."

A German ornithologist, Dieter Burckhardt, is usually credited with at last giving this demand for privacy a name -- "individual distance." It was in 1944, and he observed that for any given species the demand for distance is specific. In fact, however, it was Zurich's Heini Hediger who a few years earlier observed the phenomenon and gave it the name. But it was not until well after the war that the term began to gain currency. Then an observer in London noticed that tufted ducks, swimming in the civilized lagoons of St. James's Park, kept two to three body lengths apart. The same observer visited Skokholm Island, that fragment of Wales so beloved by the Boston shearwater, and gave his attention to meadow pipits. It was September, the breeding season long over. There were neither sexual arguments nor quarrels over food, yet the meadow pipits chased each other continually to wind up a minimum of six feet apart.

Batches of species came under observation as if seen for the first time. A covey of partridges, non-territorial, will drive any other covey from wherever it happens to be. European brown trout even in the fry stage demand and [147] receive three inches in all directions. Wildly unrelated species like the lucerne flea and that oysterish bivalve called Tellina tenuis, an inhabitant of coastal mud flats keep neighbors at a tiny, fixed distance. The cliff swallow,' flying always in flocks, nesting always in dense colonies, would seem to regard privacy as of small value. Yet no two nests will be built within pecking distance.

To confirm the prevalence of animal privacy one has only to close one's eyes and remember: antelopes, golden and gleaming, spread across a swelling African veld-spaced cattle in an English field; birds resting on a telephone line that we pass in our cars, each separated! from his neighbor by a distance so invariable that they resemble beads on a string or markers on a giant ruler. Patterns lie all about us in the arrangements of living beings, and with eye only for the beauty we move through the mathematics of natural dispositions. Perhaps it is enough that we ask solely for beauty; but it will diminish the beauty not at all if we also ask why.

No passage in the literature of animal behavior is lovelier than Niko Tinbergen's description of the first arrival of herring gulls at any of their traditional breeding grounds on the Dutch coast. As a boy he watched the gull communities, year after year, and came to see them not as random collections of birds but as expressions of an intricate social structure, of infinitely complex relations between individuals. To the untrained eye the relationships were invisible, yet slowly they revealed themselves as firm and real. Even the tutored observer, however, could still but guess and hazard why was this, why that. As a mature scientist Tinbergen would return to his Holland shore and be seized by the beauty and the wonder.

"On a warm, sunny day in March we may watch the first revival of the gulls' interest in their traditional breeding haunts. As the tide rises, covering the sandy beach where the herring gulls forage, the hazy blue sky above the dry dunes may suddenly become alive with gulls. Their strong and melodious voices can be heard long before one sees the gulls themselves high up in the air where hundreds of them are soaring and circling. As they come gliding down, we see their wonderful white wings flash up again and again; like huge snowflakes they whirl around, coming down in what seems to be wild disorder." [148]

But the gulls do not alight. For a quarter of an hour they may dip and turn and give every indication that the moment has come, then as if by mysterious command they will vanish, winging away to the west. And that will be all for that day. But as the sunshine strengthens and the days grow longer, the flock will return. Out of the pale blue space of a springtime afternoon, voices will clamor, white wings will flash, snowflakes will tumble in confusion's blizzard as the gulls come swirling and turning, dipping and gliding lower today than yesterday, lower tomorrow than today. Still they will not alight. Perhaps a solitary bird will come down on the top of a dune, there to stretch his long neck, look all about, sample the breeze, inspect the springtime. Then he too will leave and vanish with the flock.

A day will come, nevertheless, and it will be a day like any other day. But the mood will be right. Out of a golden haze will come the flashing wings and the clamorous chorus. There will be no dipping today, however, no whirling, sampling, soaring hesitation. The immense flock will glide in, alight,, and in moments will be in possession of its inheritance of grass and dune. And the scientist will stand where the boy once stood, moved by the wonder, while an enchanted moment transmutes perfect chaos into perfect order.

The herring gull is a creature of sufficient ingenuity that if he picks up a mussel with a shell too hard for his beak to break, he will carry it to a height and drop it on a hard road. He is a creature of sufficient loyalty and perception to guarantee that he will never attack his own mate, and will recognize her among dozens flying into the colony at a distance to defy human binoculars. He is a creature of sufficient social sophistication that, while many arrive in the spring already paired, definite areas in the colony which Tinbergen calls "clubs" will be set aside as meeting places for the unpaired. He is a creature also, as we have seen, of such sensitive social adjustment that the arriving flock will make "decisions" of mood and readiness as if it were one being. So dependent is the herring gull on the community of his citizenship that he would probably be unable to breed were he to return in the spring to the wrong gull town. So powerful and incomprehensible is his attachment for home that, like the albatross, a pair may return year after year to nest in precisely the same spot, although [149] the North Sea's winter storms will have effaced all landmarks to guide his eye.

This is the herring gull, vital, vociferous, numerous, enduring, one of evolution's noisiest successes. And yet the only obvious good that he acquires from his community is the opportunity to quarrel with his neighbors. These are the fellows who will stand at their boundaries in a rage so purple that both will find vent for it by pulling up all the grass in sight. It is a society, in my opinion, formed and maintained by the lure of its inward antagonisms.

If there exists in the world of social animals a biological right of privacy, as expressed through either the private territory or through individual distance, then it is of infinite concern to contemporary man. Natural arrangements confirm that such a right exists, and so it must have biological value, although to my knowledge the value has never been explored. But if the right does exist, then why do we ourselves challenge it? Why do we enter crowds the more advantageously to resent them, gather in cities the more richly to possess neighbors to complain about? If we are a Turk or an African, then why do we leave our secure [150] village or quiet kraal to join the squalor and the unemployment, the uncertainties and physical miseries of city life? Nothing, we may be sure, could keep us away.

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it has even less use for boredom. In species after species natural selection has encouraged social mechanisms which seem ultimately to exist for no reason other than to provide conditions for antagonism and conflict and excitement. We may comprehend the evolutionary necessity for bringing together a breeding community and through migration and other forms of homing capacity for ensuring its reproductive isolation. But why must it live in a dense, disturbing, challenging, competing, squabbling, argumentative mass? If it is not to avoid boredom, then why must the animal demand for privacy stand cheek-by-jowl with the urge to plunge into the largest available crowd?

Human beings may not all emulate the herring gull in our search for diversion. We may or may not, according to temperament, seek to jostle that we may be jostled back. Of one thing, however, we may be certain: Homo sapiens is not one of those rare species that, renouncing both individual distance and the private territory, renounce the right of privacy. Fair evidence that distance matters to us was assembled just a few years ago when my own countrymen, renowned for their production of ingenious gadgets, attempted to foist on the world a chrome-and-plastic design for living called "togetherness." Togetherness sought to resolve the opposing demands of privacy and society by eliminating privacy. A man and his wife were allowed a few moments by themselves in bed, if they would be quick about it. Beyond that, so far as I recall, all private appetites -- whether geographical, intellectual, or spiritual, whether in matters of what one reads or what one eats, whether in relations between next-door neighbors or husband and wife or parents and children or employer and employe -- were regarded as somehow or other obscene. I foresaw at the time little future for togetherness. It was too boring.

The world may have joked about the American invention; but even as it joked it acknowledged the reality of that vital paradox which many of my countrymen had believed it possible, through self-induced imbecility, to deny. We are antagonistic beings, despite all social necessity. In our arts we demand color and contrast, conflict and surge. Of our news we demand scandal and mayhem, danger and [151] dread. To the eye of man the brawling community of the herring gull is a thing of beauty. Perhaps we identify ourselves with these white-winged beings dumped on a beach like snowflakes from heaven, there to behave like demons with haloes, angels with tails. And if we remain unconvinced that the herring gull is of our sort, then we have only to turn to its antithesis in behavior, a rare beast who seems never to have heard of the rights of privacy and whose diurnal society must be accepted as an ultimate if improbable realization of the fleeting American dream. I refer to the community of the hippopotamus.

I have watched hippo schools in the upper Nile, in the eastern Congo, in Lakes Albert and Edward, in nameless pools scattered here and there across Africa's dry face, and as far south as the broad, shallow rivers of Mozambique's remote Gorongosa. And in all humility, and without the least desire to scandalize his name, I must propose the hippopotamus as the most unattractive creature that land or water supports. Here is an animal who in his daytime life asks for nothing but togetherness.

In all fairness to the hippo, one must grant that he leads two lives and upholds two psyches. His skin is badly adapted to a tropic sun, and so all day he submerges himself in the neighborhood's dirtiest water, closely accompanied by his friends. At night he emerges to graze, and as you lie on your cot you can hear him roaring and groaning and hiccuping through the meadows. Were it not for one of his more astonishing daytime habits, we might never have learned what a nocturnal individualist he is. Submerged in the water in his friends' close embrace, the daytime hippo when impelled to have a bowel movement always raises his vast rump above the surface, makes the sound of a train going through a tunnel, and with rapidly flipping tail spreads fecal matter for ten yards about.

It must have been centuries ago that the Bushmen began wondering why the hippo behaved so oddly. And so they introduced to their folklore an explanation far more charming than the subject deserved. The hippo, it seems, had been originally a land animal but wanted to live in the water. He went to the Lord of the Animals seeking permission, but permission was denied. The crestfallen hippo asked, "Why?" '

"Because!" said the Lord of the Animals, impatiently. [152] "Because you are a monstrous big thing and you will eat up all the fishes."

"No," the hippo protested. "Master, I swear on my honor that I shall never eat a fish."

"Who would ever trust anybody who looked like you?" said the Lord of the Animals. But the hippo was thinking it over.

"Master," said the hippo, "I'll make a bargain with you. If you will let me live in the water, then whenever I have a bowel movement I shall spread it around with my little flipping tail, and you can see for yourself that there are no fishbones."

The Lord of the Animals thought it over and decided that it was a fair enough proposition, so the hippo went to live in the water. Many years later, however, another lord of the animals came along who felt that there must be more to it than that. This was Heini Hediger, and in the Congo he found his answer. The grazing hippo, in the dark of night, is so territorial in his exclusive demands that the pygmy form even has his penis on backward. Nature has lent structural support so that he may urinate and defecate in the same direction, and with his little fanning tail spread a mixed trademark over his grazing land, in well-founded confidence that, dark though the night may be, no one will get confused as to what is his and what isn't.

This is the nighttime hippo, with habits if disreputable then at least his own. The daytime hippo is another thing. His flesh, I must admit, is not too bad to eat; but beyond that I can think of no virtue in all his vast carcass. He is ugly: his eyes are ugly; his mouth can exist for no purpose other than to provide the nightmares of children with appropriate furniture; his body resembles a gigantic bathtub. He is the idealized synthesis of all things ugly, and perhaps the perfection of that synthesis, viewed through a hippo's goggling eyes, is hippo beauty. But I am not a hippo, and I see nothing through his eyes. Neither can I engage myself with his ways or identify myself with his purposes. He is the most graceless of beings, the most fathomless of idiot souls, a kind of prince among morons. I praised evolution for making me a man and not a Uganda kob, but the most moving of my thanksgivings must be reserved for that genetic fortune which did not make me a crocodile who must lie on some sunny sandbank somewhere, day after day, month after month, looking at hippos. [153]

I should not detail at such length the totality of my hippo-rejection were it not for my conviction that the most monstrous of all his dedications is his diurnal acceptance of collective existence. Only through haunting a hippo pool or a hippo shore can one come to realize how rare in nature is the species that makes no demand for privacy, not even three inches. A school of twenty or thirty hippos is a mass burial, half underwater, of living corpses. If a hippo is capable of pleasure -- and one must assume that he is -- then that pleasure must be derived largely from leaning on somebody else. If a hippo finds joy in hippo togetherness -- and why should he indulge in it if he did not? -- then it is the joy of pursuing one's daytime hours with one's throat clamped firmly to somebody's neck while one roars in somebody's ear, jostles eternally [154] somebody's ribs, and defecates cheerfully in somebody's face.

It is a way to live, perhaps, reserved for creatures unlikely to be admired by any but their closest friends. But I maintain that man is not such a species. We are not hippopotami. And for those advocates of human togetherness, voluntary or involuntary, who maintain that we are, and who see in such pleasures the human solution, I recommend a quick and perhaps one-way journey to Lake Edward's Congo shore.

I have taken from the French ethologist Jean-Jacques Petter the term "noyau" as a label for the society of inward antagonism. It is awkward -- even bad taste, perhaps -- to introduce a foreign word to a discussion in which we are afflicted by so many concepts foreign to our normal thinking. It has seemed to me wise, however, to get as far away as possible from all those English words like "community" or "society" which inevitably bear connotations of co-operation. Noyau -- meaning, roughly, a nucleus -- is correct in that it implies a primitive evolutionary step toward societies characterized by mutual aid. But more important to this inquiry than its precision is its lack of connotation for the English-thinking mind, and that is what we shall need if we are to build up an appreciation for those groups of individuals held together by mutual animosity, who could not survive had they no friends to hate.

The Lepilemur, or sportive lemur, has furnished us with a type species for the general noyau. He is just one of thirty-odd species of pre-monkey primates, the lemurs, still extant on the island of Madagascar. Petter and his wife have studied fifteen of them, and most lead a daytime life and have normal societies of mutual aid and co-operation. But there are nocturnal species whose manner of life corresponds not at all to that of their diurnal cousins.

The sportive lemur is one of these. He resembles an oversized African bush baby, with the pointed snout, huge round eyes, and delicate primate hands typical of all lemuroid species. He sleeps all day in a hole in a tree, but with darkness he comes out to defend a small solitary territory. All night one can hear his cries of warning or J threat to the intruder. Direct observation of any nocturnal [155] animal is difficult, as I mentioned in connection with my unfriend, the hippo. But Petter by some means obtained from the United States Army a snooper, one of those infra-red telescopes which we developed during the war for night observation. And so he was enabled to make a rough assessment of the night life of the sportive lemur. And what was remarkable was population distribution.

The solitary Lepilemur defends a territory no more than sixty or so yards in diameter. A little society of six or so may crowd itself into an area as small as an acre, where it will live in perfect recrimination. And yet there will be no other Lepilemur for miles around. Petter gave the name noyau to the angry little group, and found three such noyaux in the Ankarafantsika region of Madagascar. No consideration of food supply, of topography, of favored trees could account for either the tightness of the groups or their wide separation. Security from predators could have no bearing, since one reason for the survival of the lemur on Madagascar is lack of predators. Why, if they did not like each other, did they hang out together? It is the same question which the herring gull presented to Huxley and Montagu. And even as we slowly turn our camera from the individual to society and from animals to men, we must begin to include in our biological frame those scenes and shadows which normally we should regard as psychological.

Throughout all his career Frank Fraser Darling has been skeptical of physiological interpretations of territory. Perhaps his early years of following herds of Scottish red deer through wild highland corries gave him ample time to think. These were the same years when David Lack was teaching school and watching robins, and if it is true that an ethologist is nothing but a zoologist who likes to work in the open air, then Darling had the most pressing desires of all. In his haunting volume A Herd of Red Deer he recalls those days when he walked thirty or forty miles and managed 8000 or 10,000 feet of climbing as the most pleasant in all his recollection. To preserve the sharpness of his vision, he read little at night. It gave a man, one must assume, time to think things over.

In Darling's view, territory is psychological, not physiological. Innumerable biological benefits may be gained, as we have seen. In the end, however, there are two ways to live: to defy or to defer. With the startling exception of [156] Prior's roebucks, deer defer. Darling's red deer displayed no less attachment to a piece of earth than would lion or lizard or man. One cold winter Darling tested that attachment in a small hind herd by putting out little piles of maize. They were wary at first, but in time became quite skilled at discovering his piles wherever he might hide them. Then one day he put a pile in plain view on the far side of a brook that formed one boundary of their range. The brook was shallow and offered no obstacle. But they would not cross it. Although neither wolves nor wildcats lurked on the farther side, although no peril of any sort might confront the wanderer, still in the course of two whole years of varying weather and varying hungers no single member of the herd would leave her world to sample the alien corn.

Neither, however, would Darling's deer defend their world. Such experiences as these, I believe, led the Scottish biologist to conclude that one cannot look to food supply or the normal physiological explanations for a final distinction between species that will defend their homes and species that will not. Later on Darling had ample experience with such defiant creatures as sea birds and seals in his long period of isolation on an island in the Outer Hebrides, which he recorded in the volume called A Naturalist on Rona. The experience deepened his views that territory is in essence a psychological expression.

In 1952 Darling published "Social Behavior and Survival" in the magazine Auk. It was a paper of lasting significance. "The animal cannot stand alone," he wrote. One naturally concedes this on a basis of security, but Darling emphasized stimulation. To attain full potential, most animals need the stimulation of others of their kind. Such stimulation may come from the mere presence of other animals, as in a herd or flock. Territorial behavior, however, enhances it. Darling felt that too much attention had been paid to the fighting of neighbors; that in truth the hostility is more of a show than a fight, an act than an action. The tumult of a colony of sea birds is a vast charade, in a sense, in which few will get hurt. And the more the challenges, the tempers, the crowding, the calling, the preening and display, the greater will be the satisfaction and general social welfare.

Now he emphasized what had never been properly suggested by science before: "I would like to put forward the hypothesis that one of the important functions of territory [157] is the provision of periphery -- periphery being defined as that kind of edge where there is another bird of the same species occupying a territory. By pushing up against each other, rather than spreading themselves out, the birds are giving themselves peripheries. The breeding territory . . . is a place with two focal points, the nest site and the periphery."

In other words, it is what I might call the castle-and-border interpretation of territory. There is the castle or nest or heartland or lair to provide security, and, just as important, the border region where the fun goes on. These are basic needs of a psychological order, for security and for stimulation, and under normal circumstances they would conflict. The territorial principle has, however, satisfied both without loss to either. And I believe that if we elaborate Darling's hypothesis with the addition of a third basic need, also satisfied by territory, we shall complete a psychological pattern common to all higher animals, and perhaps to many lower animals as well.

That third need I described as one for identity. I find it useful to define the three needs in terms of their opposites: to think of security as the opposite of anxiety, of stimulation as the opposite of boredom, of identity as the opposite of anonymity. The bird seeks his invariable branch from which to advertise his presence; it is a portion of his identity. The immature Atlantic salmon seeks his unchanging pattern of pebbles on the bottom of his swift-rushing stream; they make possible his identity. A flock of Canadian geese seeks that tract of marsh which is distinguishable only to the eyes of a goose, but which distinguishes the flock from all others; the lone Uganda kob will be found always near his rock, his tree, the cricket always in his particular niche; a family of viscachas, little non-territorial rodents in the Peruvian highlands, will have an unchanging, undisputed resting place in the midst of the colony; the non-territorial starling will have always its same perching place when the flock, though numbering tens of thousands, settles for the night's rest. Neither a need for stimulation nor a need for security can explain the motivation for such attachments, but I believe that the third need can.

The animal seeks to differentiate himself from all others of his kind. As a member of a herd or flock or school or troop or noyau, the social animal belongs to a group differentiated from all other groups; and within that group he [158] acquires a territory or a rank of status or a perching or resting place, acknowledged as his alone, which distinguishes him from all other members of the group. He has achieved identity. Through a fixed and unique relationship with something larger or more lasting than himself -- the pebbles in a stream bed, the herd grazing on a slope -- he has defeated the pressures of anonymity which myriad life continually brings to bear on the individual's psyche. To discuss the psyche of the animal is to walk across dangerous ground, as Darling well knew when he proposed his hypothesis of security and stimulation as motivation for territorial behavior. To expand the hypothesis by the addition of a need for identity is to render the ground no less perilous. We cannot know what an animal "thinks," how he "looks at things." And so perhaps it will be just as well if I take my hypothesis of three basic animal needs and put it out in the sun where it may ripen for a while, where we shall find it when we return later. Just now it will do if we return to Darling's excursion into psychological motivation and his pioneer thoughts concerning security and stimulation.

Two years after Darling's statement, James Fisher took the proposition a long step further. Fisher is the imaginative ornithologist who suggested the relationship between territory and animal navigation. Now in 1954 he gave first scientific recognition to what I term the noyau. Fisher regarded Darling as the "oracle" in the field of animal sociality. He agreed with the psychological interpretation, and pointed out that the ecological interpretation of territory -- the spreading out of a population to make best use of a region's resources -- comes up against the thorny barrier of being so often untrue. Robins are not distributed evenly all over England, nor are song sparrows throughout the Ohio River Valley. Populations occur in clusters with wide areas, unpopulated or underpopulated, between. And when migrants enter the area, they will not be attracted to the unsettled regions of space, peace, and plenty, they will head for the metropolitan regions of jostling and pushing, conflict and quarrels.

"The effect," he wfote, "is to create 'neighborhoods' of individuals who while masters of their own definite and limited properties are bound firmly and socially to their next-door neighbors by what in human terms would be described as a dear-enemy or rival-friend situation, but [159] which in bird terms should more safely be described as mutual stimulation."

Fisher's stunning perception of an animal relationship so suggestive of human relationships went a little too far, I believe, for most of his colleagues. Like his perception of the relationship between territory and the inexplicable homing faculty, it raised questions for which the sciences have no means as yet of providing answers. Rapid though the advances of the new biology have been, the progress has been uneven. Particularly in that area lying between biology and psychology there still exists a scientific no man's land which most biologists would prefer not to enter. To follow too closely on Fisher's heels into the evolutionary aspects of social psychology is to risk seeing your reputation blown heaven-high by some unanticipated booby trap.

One eminent man of science with a taste for such adventure is the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, of the University of Aberdeen. His giant volume Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior was published in 1963, so recently that the land mines have only begun to explode. His reference to society as "a brotherhood of tempered rivalry" recalls James Fisher. And his basic definition of society takes one so far into the future of a presently nonexistent rapport between the natural and social sciences that neither is yet prepared to deal with it: "A society can be defined as a group of individuals competing for conventional prizes by conventional means." Let us leave that one out in the sun, too, to ripen for a while.

The noyau is Fisher's neighborhood of territorial proprietors bound together by a dear-enemy relationship. It is Wynne-Edwards' brotherhood of tempered rivalry. It is what happens when Darling's proprietors press together to provide themselves with the stimulation of peripheries. It is Huxley's and Montagu's colony of black-headed gulls who insist on breeding together so that they may argue not only over territory but individual distance. It is a mass of cliff swallows who can have no good reason for building their nests so closely together except to bring their dear enemies within more convenient pecking range. It is what happens when the country boy forsakes a secure, smalltown, low-keyed existence in search of city lights. It is the Kikuyu in Kenya's empty yellow hills or the Zulu in Natal's [160] green slumberland leaving the kraal's predictability behind, willingly, joyfully to enlist himself in Nairobi's quarreling mass of unemployed or Johannesburg's crime-ridden, pass-carrying black Utopia.

The probability is better than fair that among most vertebrate species which do not form overt social groups -- herds, flocks, schools, troops -- but seem to the eye to spread more or less continuously, more or less evenly through an appropriate environment, noyaux form a typical if invisible social organization. Chipmunks and deer mice in our woodlands, jack rabbits and ground squirrels in our deserts, bullhead and pike in our rivers, lizards and toads in our farmyards, rats and house mice in our cities seem none to belong to social groups larger than the pair or the family, and to be most antisocial in all their ways. But if you are a member of a noyau, then the degree of your hostility and the depth of your bad manners will in no way provide a proper measure of your social independence. Furiously you may need the group to serve you with members of your kind to be furious with.

A prime difficulty facing the student of the noyau is that of identifying it. Margaret Morse Nice, one of America's most notable ornithologists, achieved it in her banding of song sparrows on some lowlands near Columbus, Ohio. On these ample acres the song sparrows bunched their territories, created their peripheries, and argued endlessly. And by banding them she found that they returned season after season from their annual migration to resume their discussions with favorite enemies. Here was a society of inward antagonism. In a world of unfriendly birds and beasts, however, it is not easy to discover whether a creature must have favored fellows to be angry with or is willing to be angry at anybody. The logic of population genetics says that borders most probably exist, and that noyaux invisible to man but of social reality to deer mice and toads divide the great population into breeding communities. The difficulty is to identify the group and to define its limits. By the greatest fortune, we have two quite different creatures, Australia's satin bowerbird and South America's callicebus monkey, which have been superbly studied and [161] which reveal each most perfect glimpses of life in a noyau.

In Australia, unlike New Guinea, civilization has made possible long-continued research and a fair history of bowerbird observation. Several species inhabit the northern and eastern regions, and the satin may be found even in the suburbs of Sydney. In his comprehensive study of Australian species, A. J. Marshall placed special emphasis on the satin, and his efforts were thoroughly rewarded. The satin bowerbird is not only the citizen of a cleanly defined noyau; he is not only the cultural champion of the non-human animate world: he is also a habitual criminal, a thief, a vandal, a bully, and all in all one of the most intriguing creatures that evolution has ever turned out. And along with his remarkable qualities of behavior is a remarkable physical characteristic. The male turns blue when he becomes important.

I do not know what there is about the color blue. We speak of bluebloods. A sexually mature vervet monkey has a blue scrotum of considerable fascination to amateur photographers in southern Africa. But C. K. Brain found that if a mature vervet monkey is unwell, or inordinately dominated by fellow members in a troop, his scrotum may pale off to white. The patas monkey likewise has a blue scrotum, and when that of a maturing male turns blue enough, then it is a signal to the patas despot that the time has come to drive him out of the troop. Satin bowerbirds have a glossy plumage somewhat resembling the northern martin. The female's has a greenish tinge, and most males though sexually mature resemble the female. Not until an indeterminate age between four and seven years will his plumage turn blue as a signal to all that he is a boss. The blue males of a satin clan constitute an elite class. They build the bowers. The greens will do no better than to collect a mess of sticks.

The bowers built by blue males in Australian forests cannot rival in complexity of construction such New Guinea cousins as Lauterbach's bowerbird or the crestless gardener. The satin builds a rather ordinary structure of the avenue style with a rectangular floor plan. But by a single feat he places himself in a cultural class quite his own. Beavers may build the most elaborate dams and lodges. Gophers in Kansas and lesser mole rats in Hungary may dig the most complicated burrows equipped even with [162] sanitary chambers -- little rooms for defecation which may be walled up when they are filled. But the blue male satin bowerbird builds his bower at right angles to the rising sun.

It is fruitless to attempt to explain everything in the natural world in terms of selective value and survival necessity. There are times when one can only record what is true, and dissolve in wonder. There is a possibility that Peking man made some of his chopping tools of quartz simply because of the material's beauty, but not until human evolution produced fairly recent editions of Homo sapiens do we begin to find unarguable evidences of such dedications as that of the blue male satin bowerbird. And as if the orientation of his bower were not enough to establish his cultural championship, he paints it.

For decades the unconfirmed rumor went around Australia that this feathered demon with the house in the woods paints its interior walls dead black. Then a man named R. A. Gannon in 1930 published a careful observation in Emu, the journal of Australian ornithology. Gannon late one afternoon had come on a bower bearing signs of fresh black paint on its inside walls. The proprietor was absent. At five o'clock the next morning Gannon was staked out, waiting. The bird appeared. He moved about inside his house where the observer could not see. After a while the proprietor left, and Gannon found on the inner walls a freshly applied layer of a black sticky substance. Gannon found bits of charcoal about, but no clue as to how the bird had converted it into paint or how he had applied it. The observer waited some more. The blue male at last returned but, to Gannon's exasperation, got sidetracked by flower arrangements on his display ground. Dark fell. Having invested this much time in the mystery, the observer could not let go. Once again at daylight he was back at his post, and so was the satin bowerbird at his. The glossy little creature hopped about, chewing and swabbing, chewing and swabbing. When at last he flew off, Gannon laid hands on his materials. Out of charcoal and saliva he had produced his paint. Spongelike wads of bark had been his paintbrush. Blackened little pellets, discarded, lay all about.

In later years other observers and Marshall himself confirmed the observation. As no parallel exists, short of Homo sapiens, for the orientation of a structure, so [163] likewise in all the subhuman natural world one can find no equivalent for such a feat of decoration. The satin bower-bird is a cultural genius. That the blue male is also the animal world's most persistent thief, its most remorseless vandal, and one of its most towering bullies is a lamentable footnote which must be appended to his accomplishments. Perhaps this is what inevitably follows when you go in for the cultured way. Or perhaps it is simply the life of the noyau.

Black may be the color that the satin applies to his bower, but blue is the color that dominates his life. It is not only the color of the elite male, signaling to all lowly greens his position of privilege; it is also a symbol of worth in the species, just as gold is a symbol of worth to man. Satin bowerbirds will steal anything blue. They will raid the countryside for the most unreasonable items: blue parrot feathers, blue lobelia blossoms, bits of blue crockery, or scraps of blue wrapping paper -- all wind up on the display grounds of their bowers. In the vicinity of Sydney the satin is a fairly common bird, to the anguish of any housewife trying to raise delphiniums or cornflowers. But unlike the baboon, the thief of Africa who seems to make a specialty of plundering man, the blue male saves his best energies for raiding other bowers.

Few vertebrate species come quite so close to a caste system as does the satin bowerbird. Green males are less discriminating than blue males and will make off with dead crickets and cigar butts. But they too will steal something blue. Marshall witnessed green males hauling twenty-four-inch spikes of delphinium out of the garden of one harried Australian household, but he could never find the spikes in the greens' rude bowers. All, to the last spike, were stolen by the blues. How sharply the blue males keep an eye on any green-male collection was demonstrated by one of Marshall's experiments. He placed 100 fragments of marked blue glass in eighteen green-male rudimentary bowers. By noon the next day seventy-six were on the display grounds of neighboring blues. There had been no protest or conflict. The greens had watched the looting in silence. Vandalism is another form of behavior unknown in the subhuman vertebrate world. Perhaps it is because vandalism demands culture to vandalize. In any case, beavers do not go around smashing each other's dams, robins for all [164] their belligerence do not wreck each other's nests, Lauter-bach's bowerbird will not bring to ruin the next Lauter-bach's bowerbird's bower, and the lesser mole rat, so far as I know, does not attempt to cave in his neighbor's toilet facility. The satin bowerbird is1 a horror, an appropriate hero for adolescent gangs in London or Los Angeles. A blue male establishes and defends the territory on which he builds his bower, and to leave it unguarded for long will be to see it despoiled. A rival may come to steal; he will remain to ruin. Marshall writes that "the marauder works swiftly and silently. He tears down beakfuls of the walls and strews them about in disorder. A wrecker rarely completes his task before he is disturbed by the swift swish of wings of the owner. Usually he snatches up a beakful of blue feathers or glass as he flees. He never stays to fight."

Despite all one's prejudices in favor of prostitutes with hearts of gold, of clouds with silver linings, of the shining nobility of natural beings were they only allowed to be natural, can one honestly claim for this many-splendored scamp of the Australian forest one redeeming feature other than his creative genius? His heart is as black as his tastes are blue, and it seems impossible to believe that a being so dastardly would acknowledge rules and regulations of a social nature or accept borderlines limiting his depredations. But he does. What we have been watching is life in a definable noyau.

Marshall became curious about blue-male thievery and launched an experiment of colossal proportions. He obtained a supply of glass bottles of a uniform royal-blue color. He smashed them into fragments, numbered each [165] fragment with a diamond stylus, distributed them in conspicuous piles over an area of fifty square miles. So voracious was blue-male appetite for royal-blue fragments that within a month 80 percent of the fragments were on the display grounds of known bowers. By then, of course, the show was on the road. Fragments whistled from this bower to that as honor was demonstrated to exist not at all among blue-male thieves. Since all fragments were numbered, Marshall had the goods on everybody. No Scotland Yard found itself ever possessed of a more enviable dossier of crime. But after two solid years not one blue fragment in the entire area of fifty square miles had traveled a distance greater than 1000 yards.

The blue male steals only from his friends. And the noyau of the satin bowerbird is approximately 1000 yards in diameter, with invisible fences as high as the sky.

The fences of the callicebus monkey, by grace of human ambition, are of a far more tangible sort. In a broad area of Colombia east of the Andes is a region known as the llanos. Here for the past generation ranchers have been moving east from their Andean villages, cutting down forests to provide grazing space for their cattle. But in river bottoms and on certain steep hillsides not to the liking of cattle, the ranchers have left behind little islands of forest grove surrounded by the sea of grass. And within each little isolated grove is preserved a noyau of the callicebus monkey as in a laboratory cage.

William A. Mason is one of a new generation of American primate students, and his work with the callicebus is still in. progress. Since his observations are so recent that some have not yet been published, I am personally grateful to him for permission to record conclusions which after further years of study he may choose to revise. Mason is a scientist, however, of a most conservative sort, and I doubt that observations which he has made with such objectivity will be revised sufficiently to change their basic outline.

The callicebus is a tiny monkey, twelve inches tall and weighing about two pounds. The subspecies studied by Mason, Callicebus moloch ornatus, is a colorful little beast, as his name implies. He wears a cape of auburn fur over his chest and shoulders, and has a dark face, a bright white line across his forehead, and all is topped by a shock of red hair. A few individuals, indeed, are so gay that they wear white gloves. Sexual dimorphism is entirely absent, [166] and the female is as brightly adorned as her mate. But the callicebus is shy, and for all his bold looks is disturbed by man beneath his trees. Mason found that it was his face that caused most disturbance. Prior had found the same thing true of his roebucks, and he worked out a peculiar cape that went over his head to alter and obscure the relation of head to shoulders. Mason just waited, and kept his head down for a few weeks, and in the end animal boredom provided his camouflage.

Like that small ape, the gibbon, the callicebus operates a family-sized territory which father and mother defend with whole heart. Like the gibbon also, they are treetop creatures who normally descend to the ground only because they have missed their footing; and they are monogamous. Male and female evidently pair for life, but, unlike the gibbon, the exclusiveness of the arrangement, as we shall see, applies to everything except sex. It has been suggested to me that the chief social attribute of the primate has been his willingness to try anything. Nothing could be more true of the callicebus, the Parisian's delight. Or perhaps it is the noyau that encourages originality.

The principal area of Mason's study has been a twenty-acre grove containing nine family territories. Every family knows its boundaries to the last inch: a broken branch here, an isolated bush there, a slanted tree trunk across the way. Were the grove not so isolated and the territorial pressure-cooker not so severe, the properties might be larger and the boundaries less sharply defined. The callicebus, however, in the situation in which he finds himself, knows like a peasant every inch of his domain. And its periphery, as Darling suggested, represents his fun in life.

The little red-haired monkey wakes up in the morning with a sigh, a yawn, and a shudder of monkey regret that the night is gone. Mason's forests are so deep, so dark, that almost all of his photographs are failures. One finds in these forests no sudden, splendid tropical dawn. Here the dawn comes along like gentle, insistent fingers scratching cautiously at the nape of one's neck. Slowly the callicebus family wakes. Mother and father sleep side b;, side, tails frequently intertwined. He, the good husband does all the lugging about of children, and if they hav an infant under four months he will be so burdened. Th family shuffles about in its heartland, its castle, its sleepin [167] tree, lapping dew off leaves, snipping a bit of fruit or a berry or two. Then about seven o'clock, suddenly galvanized, the family makes for the periphery.

I find that one of the most touching qualities in the callicebus monkey is its willingness to. sacrifice a hearty breakfast for a hearty periphery. Not unless faced by extreme emergency should I make such sacrifice myself. The little family makes no compromise with principle, but bright and early is on duty at the border, only partly fed, hankering for action, waiting for the arrival of neighbors to be angry at. Shoulder to shoulder mother and father wait, tails intertwined, nursing their grudges, feeding on their animosities, impatient for the arrival of their beloved enemies. Not one foot will the family place on the neighbors' domain unless neighbors are present to make intrusion worthwhile. But let the neighbors appear, having had their dew and their scanty snack, and callicebus hell will break loose.

When I was a young man in Chicago we used to say that the secret of acknowledged Chicago vitality was 'the Chicago Tribune. We read it at breakfast, we hit the ceiling in rage either for or against it, we hit the street on a dead run, and we could not survive without it. The callicebus monkey has substituted the periphery for the Chicago Tribune. There is a deal of screeching to begin with. Then father intrudes. The opposing father chases him back and intrudes in turn. Now family is after family. Mothers put aside all grace and give themselves over to lifetime grudges. Juveniles learn the way of all flesh. Bedlam and bellicosity rule for half an hour or so, then someone recalls that there is another boundary undefended and unexploited. The family withdraws. The family across the way recalls that it too has another border, another enemy to become enraged at. No cards or apologies are exchanged, for the rules of the game are too well understood. Were the opponents medieval knights, haughtily bowing, spreading their mailed fists in a gesture of you-know-how-it-is, the callicebus monkey could no more perfectly execute the gallant code of chivalry. Here are Wynne-Edwards' conventional prizes competed for by conventional means.

On other boundaries the contestants will oppose other rivals. Vast must be the satisfactions of such engagements. Blood pressures rise, tissues expand, brains roil with [168] conventional angers. Then just about nine o'clock in the morning, after a couple of hours of emotional daily dozens, it will occur to someone that somebody is hungry. That will be the end of the day's hostilities as all take their ravenous appetites to the breakfast trees.

At a time when we had a most limited knowledge of primate behavior, Darling made his statement about the importance of the periphery as well as the heartland, of stimulation as well as security. And in a South American monkey we find the creation of a social system which provides the two. The environmentalist might argue that a special circumstance, the isolation of the forests, has imposed the pattern on the inhabitants. We have come to know enough about the territorial pattern, however, to recognize that such formal behavior is not produced by an environmental circumstance but fifteen or twenty years old. Mason informs me, furthermore, that his brief contact with the callicebus in larger, continuous forests indicates no departure from the behavior of the groups he studied. We* may suspect that in a continuous forest the noyau would be larger and would contain more groups, and that the groups might control somewhat larger properties. They would not be so large, however, as to make access to the periphery and morning confrontation with one's dearest enemies inconvenient.

Finally, there is Mason's evidence of the callicebus noyau as a most original interbreeding unit. In most vertebrate species which base their social life on the pair territory, the male asserts exclusive rights over not only his space but his female. So broadly is this true of birds that, so long as the territorial concept was an ornithologist's preserve, it was generally accepted that territory was necessarily a sexual expression in the male. Until quite recently, likewise, it has been assumed that in primate species the sexual attraction of male and female has been the bond of primate society. It is a proposition which we shall investigate at greater length in the next chapter. But the callicebus monkey, red-headed and white-gloved, has somehow upset both assumptions at once.

The female callicebus, unlike many primate species, has a season of heat like the lower mammals and is sexually unresponsive the remainder of the year. Mason's observations have continued long enough to assure us that throughout all of that long portion of the year when sex plays no [169] part in callicebus life, territorial defense is perfect, tolerance of intruders unthinkable, marital loyalty most estimable. Fidelity in the callicebus applies to everything, it seems, but sex. When the season of female heat arrives, carnival takes over. The territorial system breaks down, borders are violated by hungering males, by famished females, and for the duration of the season the ordered animosities of the noyau give way to a merry-go-round of affection, a Mardi Gras of sexual adventure in the groves of unforbidden fruit. Then the season ends. Wives forgive husbands, husbands wives. All settle down to raising those inevitable bastards conceived in the noyau's genetic popcorn-shaker. Side by side these marital paragons sleep, tails intertwined, on a tall branch in the dark forest. Side by side they report for duty on the periphery every morning, where, tails again intertwined, they will enjoy that more permanent of life's satisfactions, screeching at one's enemies.

Italy is a noyau. It is not a nation. Shortly before he died, Cavour is reputed to have said, "We have created Italy, now we must create Italians." But a century has passed since the risorgimento, and no one has yet succeeded.

Italy was a noyau even in the time of the Empire. Rome with firm hand and clear eye ruled provinces at the end of the known world, disposed law, order, stability, and a measure of justice, established memories and purposes to endure the millennia. But it could not thus rule its own peninsula. Italy remained a patchwork of jealousies, feuds, ambitions, rivalries, and headless horsemen. Rome, a small city-state, was lucky to make Italian alliances lasting a generation.

A society founded on family territories, innumerable peripheries, and an unholy complexity of inner antagonisms is a society of remarkable staying power. It is flexible. Lacking heart or head, it is difficult to kill. It may lose a portion of its body this century and get it back the next; in the meantime the absence of an arm or leg goes virtually unnoticed. It is healthy. I have only one Italian within my acquaintance suffering from ulcers, and he spent too many years in America; although daily life [170] borders on the apoplectic, few die of cerebral hemorrhage.

Noise, naturally, is a prominent characteristic of a noyau. You can hear one from a long way off. There is not only the screeching, the yowling, and the hammered insults of the peripheries, but decibels rise like chimney smoke from the heartland too. As a bird must sing from his accustomed twig to announce his propertied existence, so the Italian must turn up his radio or his television set to maximum volume or quarrel with his wife in such tones as to leave no neighbor in doubt that the master is home and in charge of the situation. If an Italian drove his car quietly or failed to rev up his engine at four in the morning, it would be a public humiliation, an announcement that he did not own a car.

Life in a noyau, for all its din of battle, is markedly lacking in danger. There are the normal bloody rendezvous, of course, for Italians are not inhuman. But life, despite the corpses floating down the Tiber or Po, is dedicated to stimulation, not assassination. I have lived for five years in a part of Rome famed for its cutthroats; New York's upper East Side is more dangerous. I have windows overlooking one of the rowdiest piazzas in town, and no Elizabethan tavern ever supported discussions more passionate; I have yet to witness a bloodied nose. A successful noyau, like any successful gullery, has its rules and [171] regulations which all understand. Should a society of inward antagonism produce nothing but decimation, little could be said for its survival value.

All forces in a true nation work for compromise and inner peace; all forces in a true noyau for division and emotional mayhem. If in Britain two drivers lightly touch their bumpers, both will say "So sorry" and drive on. In Italy there is no worse moment than when, late for an appointment, you hear a featherlike touch against your taxi's bumper. You are finished. Your drivers will stop, descend into the street, and explain their woes to heaven, to each other, and to whoever else will listen. Why else touch bumpers? But while you in your back seat explain your own woes to heaven, it will be wise to recall how infrequently you have observed a drunken Italian. It is the courteous American, Briton, Scandinavian who drinks up the world's hard liquor. The members of a noyau, for stimulation, need only drive across Rome.

Nations produce heroes, noyaux geniuses. The nation is fundamentally anti-genius, since survival rests on uniformity of response; the noyau is fundamentally anti-hero, since variation is its life's blood. The noyau must look skeptically on the hero and hope that he will not get anybody into too much trouble. The nation must look with suspicion on the genius and pray that common sense will somehow survive him.

I do not wonder that the English and the Americans have always held such affection for Italy. It was never the sun or the song. It was that here, for a while at least, they could put down their heavy suitcases of national necessity. Without loss of identity, without feeling for a moment less the Englishman or the American, they could find in old Italian streets and young Italian crowds more room to be themselves. Here tastes at home unorthodox might be explored without self-consciousness; here values less than fashionable in London or New York might be meditated, weighed with less distracted mind. The Arno, the Tiber, the Po flow past as if you were not there; and that is freedom too. The noyau, were it to encourage the obedient, would return to dust.

For the foreigner the noyau has other charms. He is accepted. He may even be liked. He will seldom be made to feel that he is a foreigner. It is a comment on the structure of the society of inner antagonism that its [171] members gain nothing from xenophobia. No portion of Italy's enduring quality has ever been forwarded by an assertion of superior identity. The Rome of Nero, of Caligula, welcomed strangers. Italy's one brief flutter, in the years between the wars, with that gown of such normal habit among true nations, manifest destiny, was a catastrophe. The Italian is a model international citizen. He will loot you, naturally, but with the charm of a man who is looting an equal. He will insult you, naturally, but with a diffidence and lack of whole heart which he would never exhibit were he insulting one of his own kind. The member of a noyau, if he is to hold his social position, must never spend his anger on any but his fellows. It is the other way around in a true nation.

Best of all from the viewpoint of the foreigner is that he need not commit himself to the noyau's hazards, immediate or ultimate. They are real, and he can always go home. The society of inward antagonism, confronted by crisis, contains no innate mechanisms to command the loyalty of its members. It is not for lack of personal courage that the Italian soldier has acquired a reputation of doubtful merit. It is for lack of inward motivation. To die for one's country is a dull way to end one's days if one has no country. The noyau, confronted by an aggressive power, must lose or make deals. Confronted by internal crisis, it must choose between disaster and the despot. Either, of course, it will outlive in a century or two.

It is an odd sort of comment, yet I should suspect that an African tribe called the Baganda, a valid nation with a million and a half members on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, has generated in the last three centuries more loyalty, more mutual aid, more self-sacrifice and dedication to the common good, than has Italy as a whole in the last three thousand years. But neither has the Baganda gallery, or the gallery of any other valid nation of greater privilege, mounted the portraits of a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli, a Leonardo da Vinci or a Lorenzo di Medici, a Dante, a Fermi, a Giotto, a Marconi, a Cristoforo Colombo or a Galileo, a Titan, a Raphael or a Modigliani, a Hadrian, a Marcus Aurelius, a Julius or Augustus Caesar, a Vergil, a Verdi, a John or a Gregory or a Thomas Aquinas, a Cicero, a Caruso, or, for that matter when you come down to think about it, an Al Capone or a Cesare Borgia. [173]

The nation has its deficiencies. None can but bow before the legitimate splendor of the Italian noyau. The splendor has been bought, however, at heavy cost. There is not only the social vulnerability; there is individual vulnerability as well. Italy is the loneliest place on earth.

You must live in a noyau, I suspect, for ten or twenty generations before you find yourself equal to it. The Italian is friendless. The society of inward antagonism, whether of human or bowerbird arrangement, cannot tolerate loyalty, honesty, trust. It forbids that total abandonment known as friendship. The animal cannot stand alone; this is true. And so the Italian has family. He may find his family an abomination, a curse laid on his life, a collective fright wig to horrify an audience of Norway rats, a genetic railway accident; but in the end he will be loyal to his family, responsible, trustworthy, self-sacrificing. He cannot be otherwise, since his family is all he has. Aside from his family, what may seem to be love in his life is merely entertainment; what passes for friendship, mere shifting alliances. It is a sad sort of place, in the end, a noyau.

The Italian, most remarkable of men, has demonstrated with his society of inward antagonism that it is possible to survive with a miraculous minimum of social trust, personal honesty, concerted action, and effective sympathy. He has survived a very long time, too, and he has presented all of civilization with individual achievements perhaps unattainable if one is burdened by national necessity. But he has paid a heavy price in vulnerability both social and individual. It is a price that most primates, human or subhuman, have been unwilling or unable to pay. I find it understandable that natural selection in the primate line, even fifty or more millions of years ago, began to turn its attention from the old noyau to the experiment known as the biological nation.