Mutual aid is very conspicuous among pelicans. “They always go fishing in numerous bands and after having chosen an appropriate bay, they form a wide half circle in face of the shore, and narrow it by paddling towards the shore, catching all the fish that happen to be enclosed in the circle. On narrow rivers and canals they even divide into two parties, each of which draws up on a half circle, and both paddle to meet each other, just as if two parties of men dragging two long nets should advance to capture all the fish taken between the nets when both parties come to meet.”
Our familiar friend, the house sparrow, is not overlooked and is said to have practiced mutual aid to such an extent as to be recognized even by the ancient Greeks. Kropotkin quotes from memory, the Greek Orator who exclaimed: “While I am speaking to you a sparrow has come to tell other sparrows that a slave has dropped on the floor a sack of corn, and they all go there to feed on the grain.” Sparrows also maintain social discipline: “If a lazy sparrow intends appropriating the nest a comrade is building, or even steals from it a few sprays of straw, the group interferes against the lazy comrade.” Kropotkin presents a number of well authenticated observations of the great compassion and sympathy prevailing among those wild creatures, which are popularly supposed to be always flying at each others’ throats: J. C. Woods’ narrative “of a weasel which came to pick up and carry away an injured comrade;” Brehm, who “himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which had a wound several weeks old.” Captain Stansbury, on his journey to Utah, as quoted by Darwin, “saw a blind pelican which was fed, and well fed, by other pelicans upon fishes which had to be brought a distance of thirty miles.”
From these and a multitude of similar cases Kropotkin concludes that while “no naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life, carried on through organic nature, is the greatest generalization of our century, that struggle is very often collective, against adverse circumstances.”
Kropotkin in concluding his consideration of animals, immensely strengthens his position by pointing out various methods by which new species may develop or old ones disappear, without the operation of a deadly competition between individuals. “The squirrels, for instance, when there is a scarcity of cones in the larch forests, remove to the fir-tree forests, and this change of food has certain well known physiological effects on squirrels. If this change of habits does not last--if next year the cones are again plentiful in the dark larch wood--no new variety of squirrels will evidently arise from this cause. But if part of the wide area occupied by the squirrels begins to have its physical characters altered--in consequence of, let us say, a milder climate or desiccation, (drying up) which both bring about an increase of the pine forests in proportion to the larch woods--and if some other conditions occur to induce squirrels to dwell on the outskirts of the desiccating region--we shall then have a new, i. e., an incipient new species of squirrels. A larger proportion of squirrels of the new, better-adapted variety would survive each year, and the intermediate links would die in the course of time, without having been starved out by Malthusian competitors.”