have some connection with the darkness of the skin, for in other North American tribes the girls marry in their twelfth or fourteenth year, and occasionally as early as the eleventh.9 The Patagonians in the south, on the contrary, are immature till the sixteenth year.10 Beauty fades earlier when the natural desire is early aroused, so that by the thirtieth and often by the twenty-fifth year all the beauty of the female is gone. Tacitus was right in ascribing the prolonged youth of our forefathers to their late marriages." So that we must recognize the postponement of marriage, either by habit or by law, as a great advance in the self-education of nations. In ancient Peru, the establishment of a household was only permitted to men in the twenty-fourth and to women in the eighteenth year. 12 The austere Abipones, who possessed the southern half of the Gran Chaco on the River Paraguay, also tolerated marriage only at a mature age.

We must not omit to mention that a great many races of mankind are quite indifferent to juvenile unchastity, and only impose strict conduct on their women after marriage. Yet it is unjustifiable to infer indifference to sexual purity from the want of a verbal expression to distinguish the maiden from the wife, as Lichtenstein ventured to do in the case of the Bushmen,13 whereas Chapman extols their modest behaviour, and adds that marriages are made among them only from inclination. Even the Abipones have no word for maiden,14 and yet Dobrizhoffer invariably eulogizes their austere morals and chastity. This deficiency of language may, on the other hand, bear an unfavourable interpretation among the Comantshes, who are in the habit of ceding their wives to their guests. 15 We find this objectionable practice again among the Aleutians, 16 who are in other ways also notorious for their unnatural excesses, among the Eskimo,

10 Musters, Among the Patagonians.

11 Sera juvenum Venus, eoque inexhausta pubertas, nec virgines festinantur. Germ. cap. 20.

12 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, vol. i. p. 113.

13 Reisen im südlichen Afrika.

14 Dobrizhoffer, Geschichte der Abiponer, vol. ii. p. 218.

15 Waitz, Anthropologie, vol. iv.

16 Ibid. vol. iii.

Polygamy and Polyandry.

221

and, lastly, Adolf Erman relates that he found the same custom in his travels through Kamtshatka. 17

The most profound instance of depravity of this sort is the so-called three-quarter marriages which occur in Nubia among the Hassiniyeh Arabs, among whom married women have free disposal of themselves on every fourth day. 18 History teaches us that all highly civilized nations have carefully guarded conjugal purity and chastity in general, and also, on the other hand, that every relaxation of morals has been closely followed by the disintegration of society.

We need hardly recall the fact that marriages are called polygamous when the man shares his household with several wives, and polyandric when the wife belongs simultaneously to several husbands. Polygamy extends throughout Africa; it was also permitted to nearly all Asiatic nations, but in America, on the contrary, it is very rare. The census has hitherto shown that the numbers of the two sexes are equally balanced, and the excess of one over the other is generally very slight. The greatest trustworthy difference of numbers occurs among the European Jews, among whom male births greatly preponderate. 19 Although,

according to the statements of travellers, among the Ladinos, or hybrids of Europeans with the aboriginal inhabitants of Central America, the number of girls is half as much again as that of boys, and in Yucatan, according to Stephens, is twice as great, and at Cochabamba is supposed to be fivefold,20 yet these statements are

17 Marco Polo records the same respecting the oasis of Kamul (Hamil) in Gobi. There however, as well as in the oasis of Fezzan, also touched at by the caravans, this immoral habit is based on mercenary motives. A. Erman, Reise um die Erde.

18 Ausland.

19 According to Waitz, and also Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 301 :—

not based on actual calculations, and are therefore of little scientific value. Campbell, a thoroughly trustworthy observer, asserted on the other hand that boys and girls are born in equal numbers in the Siamese harem. 19 This refutes the theory so often put forward, that polygamy causes female births to predominate, polyandry the male; so that Nature as it were adapts herself to the matrimonial laws prevalent in different localities. The experiences of breeders of animals also contradict this hypothesis, for in the case of racehorses, greyhounds, and Cochin China fowls, the equal balance of the sexes in the births is undisturbed by the strict polygamy which prevails.20 German statistics, however, afford

good evidence of the preponderance of boys at the first birth.21 But as social beings, we are subject to a moral order, and this is decidedly unfavourable to polygamy. The history of oriental dynasties teaches us that the brief duration of the governing races is always to be traced to the intrigues of ambitious wives; that the ennobling sentiment of brotherly love is totally wanting there, and that every son of a royal house is apt to hate his halfbrother as his most inveterate enemy. Even in ordinary families envy and jealousy estrange the children of different mothers.

Polyandry is less widely spread; it must not be confounded with the community of wives of the military castes to whom celibacy was prescribed as a vow of the order, such as the Naiars of Malabar,22 and formerly certain Cossacks.23 The true form of

Of 1001 Cochin China chickens hatched, there were 487 cocks and 514 hens. 21 Welcker, Bau und Wachsthum des Schädels. According to the birth registers of Halle, in the case of first births there were 114 boys to every 100 girls, and in the genealogical pocket calendar of German princely families, there were 116 male births to 100 female, while in the total births of Germany the numerical proportion is 106: 100.

22 Grauf, Ostindien.

23 C. von Kessel, Ausland, No. xxxvii. 1872.

polyandry occurs among the nations connecting Asiatics and Americans, namely, the Eskimo, the Aleutians, the Koniaks, and the Kolushs, 24 among whom the sexual relations are abnormal in other ways. In America the Iroquois and certain tribes on the Orinoco are also accused of polyandry by Sir John Lubbock. It is also said to have been found in the South Seas, among the Maori of New Zealand, and on several small islands. It occurs more frequently in Southern India, among individual tribes of the Nilgherri hills, among whom custom allows all the brothers as they grow up to become the husbands of the eldest brother's wife; and, conversely, the younger sisters of the wife become the wives of this conjugal community. The aborigines of Great Britain, in the time of Cæsar, had the same habit. 25 Community of wives is limited to brothers and other relations in Thibet, where this unnatural habit is attributed to motives of economy. 26 Poverty is also the cause of the occasional occurrence of polyandry among the Herero of South America. 27

The origin of the custom of avoiding marriages among blood relations is one of the most obscure but instructive problems of ethnology. Recent experience enables us to infer that such admixture of blood is injurious, for if both husband and wife suffer from the same bodily defects, they will transmit it in an enhanced form to their progeny. Deafness, short sight, sterility, idiocy, and mental derangements make their appearance early, or break out with violence, in the children of parents who have transmitted the germs of these diseases. 28

24 Waitz, Anthropologie, vol. iii.

25 De bello gallico, lib. v. cap. xiv.

26 Von Schlagintweit, Indien.

27 G. Fritsch, Die Eingebornen Südafrika's, p. 227.

28 Even this hypothesis is not free from all doubt. In the community of Batz, 3300 inhabitants, situated on a peninsula to the north of the mouth of the Loire, and where the emptying of natural saltpans is the only occupation, intermarriages among relations have been customary from time immemorial. Thus in the year 1865 no less than fifteen ecclesiastical dispensations for marriages between cousins were procured. Voisin, who spent a whole month there, did not find, as the result of forty marriages between blood relations, respecting which he collected complete pedigrees, a single case of the diseases which usually threaten such alliances. Anthropological Review, vol. vi. London, 1868.

But this knowledge, which can only be gained by lengthened observation, is unattainable by unsettled and childishly heedless races, so that it is exactly among such that a horror of incest is developed most strongly. According to this theory, we should most especially avoid marriage with a sister, who, as regards blood, is the same as ourselves, and stands as near again to us as mother or daughter, with whose organism our own only half agrees as to descent; yet this particular marriage was prescribed to the Inca of the kingdom of Peru, 29 nor could the Pharoah of Egypt select a more fitting consort than his own sister. 30 In ancient Persia marriage with a sister or a mother was not merely allowed, but the intermarriage of relations was looked upon as a meritorious act,31 and it is known that the Greeks, at least, allowed marriage with half-sisters even if they did not actually approve of them. 32 While these highly civilized nations did not recoil from such alliances, the less civilized felt a terror of them which was probably salutary: it is quite exceptional that the Veddahs of Ceylon allow the brother to espouse his younger sister.33 It is less surprising that every form of incest is considered permissible 34 among the Aleutians and Koniaks, and probably among other nations on the shores of Behring's Straits, for they are all notorious for their licentiousness.

The Australians, on the contrary, adhered strictly to the rule that no man was allowed to marry a woman who even bore the same family name as himself.35 Marriages among people of the same surname were also strictly avoided among the Samoyeds and Ostiaks.36 The Hurons and Iroquois tolerated no marriages between relations. 37 The Kolushs, who are divided into the two branches of the Crows and the Wolves, forbid all marriages

29 Garcilasso, Commentarios reales. Only in default of a sister were the other female relations taken in succession.

35

Captain Gray as quoted by Eyre, Central Australia, vol. ii. p. 330. 36 Castrèn, Vorlesungen.

37 Charlevoix, Nouvelle France, vol. iii.