I PROLOGUE 49 



wrong doing as they. It would be as absurd as in 

 their case, to regard his pleasures, any more than 

 theirs, as moral rewards, and his pains, any more 

 than theirs, as moral punishments. 



7. From the remotest ages of which we have 

 any cognizance, death has been the natural and, 

 apparently, the necessary concomitant of life. In 

 our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing 

 but plants, death must have very early resulted 

 from the struggle for existence : many of the 

 crowd must have jostled one another out of the 

 conditions on which life depends. The occurrence 

 of death, as far back as we have any fossil record 

 of life, however, needs not to .be proved by such 

 arguments ; for, if there had been no death there 

 would have been no fossil remains, such as the 

 great majority of those we met with. Not only 

 was there death in the world, as far as the record 

 of life takes us; but, ever since mammals and 

 birds have been preyed upon by carnivorous 

 animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by 

 mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it. 



8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness 

 of the structural relations between the human 

 organisation and that of the mammals which 

 come nearest to him, on the one hand ; and with 

 the palseontological history of such animals as 

 horses and dogs, on the other ; will not be disposed 

 to question the origin of man from forms which 

 stand in the same sort of relation to Homo 



