THE DESCENT OB ORIGIN OF MAN 187 



kid prevailed — and prevailed by virtue not of its good 

 qaalities, but of its faults." 



There are, however, some checks to this downward ten- 

 dency. We have seen that the intemperate suffer from a 

 high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave 

 few offspring. The poorest classes crowd into towns, and 

 it has been proved by Dr. Stark, from the statistics of ten 

 years in Scotland,"' that at all ages* the death-rate is higher 

 in towns than in rural districts, "and during the first five 

 years of life the town death-rate is almost exactly double 

 that of the rural districts." As these returns include both 

 the rich and the poor, no doubt more than twice the number 

 of births would be requisite to keep up the number of the 

 very poor inhabitants in the towns, relatively to those in 

 the country. With women, marriage at too early an age 

 is highly injurious; for it has been found in France that, 

 "twice as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died 

 out of, the same number of the unmarried." The mortality, 

 also, of husbands under twenty is "excessively high," " but 

 what the cause of this may be, seems doubtful. Lastly, if 

 the men who prudently delay marrying until they can bring 

 up their families in comfort were to select, as they often do, 

 women in the prime of life, the rate of increase in the better 

 class would be only slightly lessened. 



It was established from an enormous body of statistics, 

 taken during 1853, that the unmarried men throughout 

 Prance, between the ages of twenty and eighty, die in a 

 much larger proportion than the married ; for instance, out 

 of every 1,000 unmarried men, between the ages of twenty 

 and thirty, 11.3 annually died, while of the married only 

 6.5 died." A similar law was proved to hold good, during 



" "Tenth Annual Report of Births, Deaths, etc., in Scotland," 186T, 

 p. ixix. 



** These quotations are taken from our highest authority on such questions, 

 namely Dr. Fair, in his paper "On the Influence of Marriage on the Mortality 

 of the French People," read before the Nat. Assoc, for the Promotion of Social 

 Science, 185Ra- 



^' Dr. Firr, ib. The quotations given below are extracted from the same 

 striking papur. 



