ABSTRACT
Birth control has had a curious and fluctuating history. The necessity for some control of population had often been recognized implicitly (and doubtless here and there explicitly) since the earliest times, especially among peoples whose geographical or political situation prevented the occupation of fresh territory as their numbers increased. Such control was partly exercised by the method of infanticide, though social customs limiting in one way or another the amount of sexual intercourse have always played some part. It may be that some methods of contraception were known to primitive peoples. All we are sure of, however, is that in the eighteenth century certain of the mechanical methods still in use were beginning to find favour at any rate among a few of the upper classes in Europe. On the theoretical side the greatest event was the publication of Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798. Malthus herein stated the fundamental law that, as in the case of other animals, so too in man, the reproductive powers are greatly in excess of the actual possibilities of increase as determined by the amount of food available-a law that has ever since met with a most varied reception. Hailed by some as the most important proposition in sociology and economics, it has always encountered hedging or open opposition on the part of others; so much so that, even to-day, more than 130 years after its formulation, it cannot be said to be generally accepted, much less satisfactorily refuted. This ambiguous attitude is all the more remarkable in that both Darwin and Wallace were led to their ideas of evolution through their reading of Malthus, whose biological doctrine forms indeed one of the essential elements of Darwin's theory. Darwinism has-in its main outlines, if not in its detailed formulations-been accepted now for many years, but that part of the whole which constituted the first step in Darwin's own argument still receives a dubious welcome-a curious and illogical state of affairs which seems to indicate that there are perhaps some special psychological difficulties in the way of its acceptance.
