, as moral punishments.

7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has
been the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life.
In our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death
must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of
the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which
life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any
fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such
arguments; for, if there had been no death there would have been no
fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not
only was there death in the world, as far as the record of life takes
us; but, ever since mammals and birds have been preyed upon by
carnivorous animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by
mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it.

8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural
relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which
come nearest to him, on the one hand; and with the palaeontological
history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be
disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the
same sort of relation to _Homo sapiens_, as _Hipparion_ does to
_Equus_. I think it a conclusion, fully justified by analogy, that,
sooner or later, we shall discover the remains of our less specialised
primatic ancestors in the strata which have yielded the less
specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present, fossil remains
of men do not take us hack further than the later part of the
Quaternary epoch; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ more
from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses.
Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used
by the ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the
palaeolithic and neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage
state to the civilizations of Egypt and of Mycenae; though the true
chronological order of the remains actually discovered may be
uncertain.

9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge
affords no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to
a lower state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural
evolution; which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such
localities as the valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the
Ni