THE DESCENT OB ORIGIN OF MAN 71 



means of subsistence; though there is reason to believe that 

 in some cases (as in Japan) it has been intentionally encour- 

 aged 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 own 

 offspring, or to be quite devoid of jealousy. There would 

 have 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 rap- 

 idly; 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 cannot 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 ele- 

 phant, 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 increased; or that, as each district became 

 fully stocked, this same power was diminished. No doubt 



*^ A writer in the "Spectator" (March 12, ISTl, p. 320) comments as fol- 

 lows on this passage: "Mr. Darwin finds liimself compelled to reintroduce a 

 new doctrine of the fall of man. He shows that the instincts of the higher 

 animals are far nobler than the habits of savage races of men, and he finds him- 

 self, therefore, compelled to reintroduce — in a form of the substantial orthodozy 

 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 tem- 

 porary 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 knowl- 

 edge forbidden him by his highest instinct assert beyond this?" 



