SEXUAL SELECTION IN BELATION TO MAN 765 



the ancestors of man would not be sufficiently advanced 

 in intellect to look forward to distant contingencies; they 

 would not foresee that the rearing of all their children, 

 especially their female children, would make the struggle 

 for life severer for the tribe. They would be governed 

 more by their instincts and less by their reason than are 

 savages at the present day. They would not at that period 

 have partially lost one of the strongest of all instincts, com- 

 mon to all the lower animals, namely, the love of their 

 young offspring; and consequently they would not have 

 practiced female infanticide. Women would not have been 

 thus rendered scarce, and polyandry would not have been 

 practiced; for hardly any other cause, except the scarcity 

 of women, seems sufficient to break down the natural and 

 widely prevalent feeling of jealousy, and the desire of each 

 male to possess a female for himself. Polyandry would be 

 a natural stepping stone to communal marriages or almost 

 promiscuous intercourse; though the best authorities be- 

 lieve that this latter habit preceded polyandry. During 

 primordial times there would be no early betrothals, for 

 this implies foresight. Nor would women be valued merely 

 as useful slaves or beasts of burden. Both sexes, if the 

 females as well as the males were permitted to exert any 

 choice, would choose their partners not for mental charms, 

 or property, or social position, but almost solely from ex- 

 ternal appearance. All the adults would marry or pair, 

 and all the offspring, as far as that was possible, would 

 be reared; so that the struggle for existence would be peri- 

 odically excessively severe. , Thus during these times all 

 the conditions for sexual selection would have been more 

 favorable than at a later period, when man had advanced in 

 his intellectual powers, but had retrograded in his instincts. 

 Therefore, whatever influence sexual selection may have 

 had in producing the differences between the races of man, 

 and between man and the higher Quadrumana, this influence 

 would have been more powerful at a remote period than at 

 the present day, though probably not yet wholly lost. 



Descent — ^VOL. 11. — 15 



