xvm ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 427 



The truth is that organisation as a method of maintaining 

 the species is set from the first in antithesis to Natural 

 Selection. Natural Selection rests on destruction. It 

 maintains the type only by sacrificing the majority of 



fertility arrived at by taking the number of survivors, first after 15, then 

 after 25 years of married life. 



GROSS AND NET FERTILITY (DANISH FIGURES). 



The broad result for our purposes is to show that the proportion of 

 children surviving to the age at which they might in turn marry and have 

 children varies from 60 per cent, upwards. We shall therefore not be 

 far wrong if we take three children, or a fraction over, to a marriage, as 

 the number required to maintain the level of population in a modern 

 civilised country of the first rank. We seem, further, to be pretty safe in 

 assuming that a higher rate is required in a country of distinctly lower 

 civilisation, such as Russia. Passing to non-European countries, we find 

 a wild confusion of assertions as to the birth-rate. It has been suggested 

 on the basis of such statements as are to be found collected in Floss's 

 Das Weib, that the non-European birth-rate tends to be rather lower than 

 the European, averaging perhaps four to the family, or a fraction below. 

 But here three remarks suggest themselves. The first is, that the ten- 

 dency of casual observations of this kind is almost undoubtedly to under- 

 estimate. A missionary in a savage tribe finds three children with the 

 father and mother, and takes that as the number of the family, ignoring 

 the grown-up, the dead, and the unborn. Mr. Sutherland indeed says 

 roundly that " wherever travellers have taken pains to discover, not the 

 number of children actually alive, but the number that had been born 

 to a savage woman, the result comes out about seven to ten for each." 

 The second point is, that even if we took the low figures given as fair 

 samples, and assumed the birth-rate of non-European nations to be 

 below that of Europeans, still it does not follow that the wastage of 

 life is so low. To settle this point, we should have to know further, 

 whether in less civilised countries increase of population is found to 

 go along with the lower birth-rate. And that brings us to the third 

 point, i.e., the well-known fact that many savage tribes, where the birth- 

 rate is known to be low, are actually becoming extinct. 



So far then, the slender and unsatisfactory evidence available would 

 seem to show that the diminution of wastage, which is one of the most 



