MANNER OF DEVELOPMENT. 45 



namely infanticide, especially of female infants, and the habit of 

 procuring abortion. These practices now prevail in many quar- 

 ters of the world; and infanticide seems formerly to have pre- 

 vailed, as Mr. M'Lennan" has shown, on a still more extensive 

 scale. These practices appear to have originated in savages recog- 

 nizijg the difficulty, or rather the impossibility of supporting all 

 the infants that are born. Licentiousness may also be added to 

 the foregoing checks; but this does not follow from failing means 

 of subsistence; though there is reason to believe that in some cases 

 (as in Japan) it has been intentionally encouraged as a means of 

 keeping down the population. 



If we look back to an extremely remote epoch, before man had 

 arrived at the dignity of manhood, he would have been guided 

 more by instinct and less by reason than are the lowest savages 

 at the present time. Our early semi-human progenitors would not 

 have practiced infanticide or polyandry; for the instincts of the 

 lower animals are never so perverted'"' as to lead them regularly to 

 destroy their cwn offspring, or to be quite devoid of jealousy. 

 There would hav« been no prudential restraint from marriage, and 

 the sexes would have freely united at an early age. Hence the 

 progenitors of man would have tended to increase rapidly; but 

 checks of some kind, either periodical or constant, must have 

 kept down their numbers, even more severely than with existing 

 savages. What the precise nature of these checks were, we can- 

 not say, any more than with most other animals. We know that 

 horses and cattle, which are not extremely prolific animals, when 

 first turned loose in South America, increased at an enormous rate. 

 The elephant, the slowest breeder of all known animals, would in 

 a few thousand years stock the whole world. The increase of 

 every species of monkey must be checked by some means; but not, 

 as Brehm remarks, by the attacks of beasts of prey. No one will 

 assume that the actual power of reproduction in the wild horses 

 and cattle of America, was at first in any sensible degree in- 



«i 'Primitive Marriage,' 1S65. 



"2 A writer in the 'Spectator' (March 12th, 1871, p. 320) comments as 

 follows on this passage :— "Mr. Darwin finds himself compelled to re- 

 "Introduce a new doctrine of the fall of man. He shows that the 

 "instincts of the higher animals are far nobler than the habits of sav- 

 "age races of men, and he finds himself, therefore, compelled to re- 

 "introduce,— in a form of the substantial orthodoxy of which he 

 "appears to be quite unconscious, — and to introduce as a, scientific 

 "hypothesis the doctrine that man's gain of knowledge was the cause 

 "of a temporary but long-enduring moral deterioration as indicated by 

 "the many foul customs especially as to marriage, of savage tribes. 

 "What does the Jewish tradition of the moral degeneration of man 

 "through his snatching at a knowledge forbidden him by his highest 

 "instinct assert beyond this?" 



