476 



The Intensity of Natural Selection in Man. 



reduced but emphasized when correction is made for the secular change in 

 environment.* 



It is not my purpose to enter into a discussion of the rise in infantile 

 mortality which has gone on in this country since the fall in the birth-rate 

 started, but I think enough has been done to indicate that when allowance is 

 made for environment, a heavy infantile death-rate indicates a reduced child 

 death-rate. Further, so far from the conclusion that " a high infant death- 

 rate in a given community implies in general a high death-rate in the next 

 four years of life" being true, it is quite incorrect for 14 of the most 

 important English life-tables. These tables support parallel evidence of 

 other kinds, that the Darwinian theory has application to civilised man, and 

 that a heavy death-rate does mean the elimination of the weaklings. To 

 recognise this as a scientific law which controls the evolution of man as of 

 other species is one thing ; to assert that the men of science who accept it 

 desire themselves or through the State to play Herod to our modern infants 

 is another thing and a pernicious thing. It is the duty of science to discover 

 what is happening in the first place, and there appears to me a fair amount 

 of evidence now to show that Darwinism does apply to man, and that, for a 

 constant environment, the higher the infantile death-rate, the more resistant 

 will be the surviving child population. 



* Because the correlation between c and e is so nearly perfect that the term ^(1 — r ce 2 ) 

 in the denominator of e r ci dominates the relationship. 



