148 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
them down there." So our very familiarity with society has kept us from stopping to think about society in a way to make us understand society.
Possibly this needs to be illustrated. We of course get sophisticated in society so that we know how to carry ourselves in a certain customary fashion. We know where to get ordinary wants supplied. We go to butcher, and baker, and candlestick- maker, and tailor, and seamstress, and doctor, and lawyer, and printer, and actor for their different sorts of service ; and we sel- dom call upon one of these for work that belongs to another. If we do blunder and confuse these different people we make ourselves ridiculous. I was in a confectioner's on State street the other day when a young women came in with a bottle and asked the soda-fountain attendant for some cough medicine. The sales- women all giggled and the customers arched their eyebrows with most superior airs. The young woman did not show ordinary practical acquaintance with society. But suppose one of those clerks or customers had been asked to explain how it comes about that there is a confectioner on one corner and a druggist on the opposite corner ; how it is possible for either to pursue his occupation year after year without closing his shop period- ically and wandering far afield to gather the stuffs from which his goods are made ; how each can foresee what sort and amount of his wares will be called for, and how he can have them in stock waiting for buyers. In all probability not one of those people who laughed at the unsophisticated girl could take many steps in precise explanation without betraying essentially equal ignorance. In our thought about society most of us are much like the English country gentleman who divided the animal kingdom into "game," "vermin," and "stock." Such a classification serves the country gentleman's purpose well enough, but how about the naturalist ? Plover and wild boars are alike " game," but in anatomical structure they hardly belong together. Geese and oxen are alike "stock," but the uses to man which justify this common designation do not correspond with the sort of resemblances that mark members of the same zoological species.
