APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MARCH, 1899. 



THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 



By JAMES COLLIER. 

 VII.— SOCIAL EVOLUTION. 



PERHAPS there is no civilized institution to which man has ac- 

 commodated himself with so ill a grace as monpgamy. Hardly 

 a perversion of it has ever existed but may still be found. Polygamy 

 is widely spread in the most advanced communities; temporary poly- 

 androus menages a trois are known to exist elsewhere than among 

 the Nairs and Tibetans and ancient Britons; the matriarchate in one 

 shape or another may be detected well outside the sixty peoples 

 among whom Mr. Tylor has discovered it; and marriage by free 

 choice is far from having superseded marriage by capture or by pur- 

 chase. It is the less surprising that abnormal or ancient forms of 

 the union should have been revived in colonies. In this relationship, 

 as in most others, the colonist, like the sperm cell after its junction 

 with the germ cell, sinks at once to a lower level, and the race has to 

 begin life over again. The fall is inevitable. The earliest immi- 

 grants are all of them men. Everywhere finding indigenes in the 

 newly settled country, they can usually count on the complaisance 

 or the submissiveness of the tribesmen. Native women have a strange 

 fascination for civilized men, even for those who have been intimate 

 with the European aristocracies and have belonged to them. Ad- 

 venturous Castins might find their account in a relationship that was 

 in perfect keeping with the wild life they led. It is more strange 

 that, enslaved by an appetite which sometimes rose to a collective 

 if seldom to a personal passion, educated men, with a scientific or a 

 public career flung open to them at their option, able men who have 

 written the best books about the races they knew only too well, men 



YOL. LIV. — 42 



