It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.
In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.
It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of philosophy.
In any case, it suffers a little for what I think is the naive thesis of "if only mankind could cooperate like the animals do, we would live in a utopia." Of course, mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense, so the point seems rather moot.