SEPARATION OF SEXES 93 



In those early days, before our brute ancestors 

 had learned to arm themselves artificially, the strug- 

 gle for existence among the higher mammalia, in so 

 far as it depends on race and individual competition, 

 must inevitably have been of far greater severity 

 than indicated by present appearances. 



Wild brutes were much more abundant in tropic, 

 semi-tropic, and temperate climates than they are 

 to-day. For, since those times, there has been an 

 agency at work incalculably more destructive of 

 mammalian life than all other known causes, viz., 

 the murderous ingenuity and energy of our artifi- 

 cially armed brute-ancestors. Other predatory 

 brutes, even the fiercest and most cruel among them, 

 take life or inflict bodily injury only when impelled 

 by the primary instincts of self or race preservation. 

 They kill creatures of other races than their own 

 for food. They defend their own bodies and their 

 lives against the aggressions of enemies. They fight 

 with the males of their own race for the possession 

 of females. They defend the food they have cap- 

 tured, the place in which food or water may be 

 found, the security of the cave, nest, or other abiding 

 place which they have occupied or constructed, and 

 the bodies or lives of their females and young, against 



explanation is the simplest and most natural and conforms to 

 the rule of parsimony. 



Chastity is quite a different thing. For it refers to the ex- 

 clusive reservation of the reproductive organs of one individual 

 to the use of a special individual of opposite sex. Only the 

 absolute power of man over woman could have originated and 

 selected such a trait. 



