suffer from severe famines. At such times savages are forced to devour
much bad food, and their health can hardly fail to be injured. Many
accounts have been published of their protruding stomachs and emaciated
limbs after and during famines. They are then, also, compelled to
wander much, and, as I was assured in Australia, their infants perish
in large numbers. As famines are periodical, depending chiefly on
extreme seasons, all tribes must fluctuate in number. They cannot
steadily and regularly increase, as there is no artificial increase in
the supply of food. Savages, when hard pressed, encroach on each
other s territories, and war is the result; but they are indeed almost
always at war with their neighbours. They are liable to many accidents
on land and water in their search for food; and in some countries they
suffer much from the larger beasts of prey. Even in India, districts
have been depopulated by the ravages of tigers.
Malthus has discussed these several checks, but he does not lay stress
enough on what is probably the most important of all, namely
infanticide, especially of female infants, and the habit of procuring
abortion. These practices now prevail in many quarters of the world;
and infanticide seems formerly to have prevailed, as Mr. M Lennan (61.
Primitive Marriage, 1865.) has shewn, on a still more extensive
scale. These practices appear to have originated in savages recognising
the difficulty, or rather the impossibility of supporting all the
infants that are born. Licentiousness may also be added to the
foregoing checks; but this does not follow from failing means of
subsistence; though there is reason to believe that in some cases (as
in Japan) it has been intentionally encouraged 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 practised infanticide or
polyandry; for the instincts of the lower animals are never so
perverted (62. A writer in the Spectator (March 12, 1871, p. 320)
comments as follows on this passage: Mr. Darwin finds himself
compelled to reintroduce a new doctrine of the fall of man. He shews
that the instincts of the higher animals are far nobler than the habits
of savage races of men, and he finds himself, therefore, compelled to
re-introduce, in a form of the substantial orthodoxy of which he
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