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results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. "Those communities, " he wrote, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring" (p. 2 in reference to Darwin's 2nd edition, p. 163). Kropotkin did not deny that competition existed in nature. Nor did he claim competition was all bad. Further, he did not maintain that everything in nature was all goodness and kindness. Kropotkin's view, however, of what motivates mutual aid is interesting. To reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as whole. It is not love to my neighbour--whom I often do not know at all--which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. ... It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy--an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life. (p. xii) Chapters 1 and 2 concern mutual aid among animals. Kropotkin states that social species of mammals greatly outnumber those species that are not social and that intelligence itself is an "eminently social faculty." While fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay; while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest chances of survival and of further evolution, although they may be inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and Wallace, save the intellectual faculty (p. 57). Kropotkin examines Darwin's evidence and concludes, "Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. In the great struggle for life--for the greatest possible fullness and intensity of life with the least waste of energy--natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition as much as possible (p. 74)." Chapter 3 examines mutual aid among early humans and traditional peoples, giving evidence that their so-called "savage" characteristics were/are exaggerations and unusual instances, whereas cooperation was/is the norm. He counters Hobbesian philosphy's view that "the state of nature" was struggle against fellow humans. Thomas Huxley and others sought to combine Darwin's ideas with those of Hobbes. The next two chapters discuss mutual aid in medieval cities. The book's last two chapters, both entitled "Mutual Aid among Ourselves", begin with a discussion of how modern society has loosened some of the bonds used to hold people together. Kropotkin proceeds to provide evidence that despite changes in society, people have maintained old ways of working together and developed new ones, including peasants and farmers' associations, labour unions, clubs, societies, associations, religious organizations, and charitable bodies. Kropotkin does not deny that alongside cooperation is a contrary current, that of self-assertion and individualism. What he argues it that this latter current has received all the attention and all the glory, while the mutual aid current has been dismissed as non- existent and derided as folly. Ashley Montagu, in his foreword, declares that subsequent investigations in various fields have generally confirmed Kropotkin's assertions.