z 72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gusted on hearing that in England a man has only one wife. This is 

 a feeling by no means peculiar to them. 



" An intelligent Kandyan chief, with whom Mr. Baily visited these Ved- 

 dahs, was perfectly scandalized at the utter barbarism of living with only one 

 wife, and never parting until separated by death. 'It was,' he said, 'just like 

 the wanderoos' (monkeys)." ' 



Again, one would suppose that, as a matter of course, monogamy, 

 polygamy, and polyandry, in its several varieties, exhausted the pos- 

 sible forms of marriage. An utterly unexpected form is furnished us 

 by one of the African tribes. Marriage, among them, is for so many 

 days in the week commonly for four days in the week, which is said 

 to be " the custom in the best families : " the wife during the oif days 

 being regarded as an independent woman who may do what she 

 pleases. We are little surprised, too, on reading that, by some of the 

 hill-tribes of India, unfaithfulness on the part of the husband is held 

 to be a grave offence, but unfaithfulness on the part of the wife a triv- 

 ial one. We assume, as self-evident, that good usage of a wife by a 

 husband implies, among other things, absence of violence ; and hence 

 it seems scarcely imaginable that in some places the opposite criterion 

 holds. Yet it does so among the Tartars. 



" A nursemaid of mine left me to be married, and some short time after she 

 went to the Natchalniok of the place to make a complaint against her husband. 

 He inquired into the matter, when she coolly told him her husband did not love 

 her. lie 5sked her how she knew he did not love her; 'Because,' she replied, 

 ' he never whipped me.' " 2 



A statement which might be rejected as incredible, were it not for 

 the analogous fact that, among the South African races, a white mas- 

 ter who does not thrash his men is ridiculed and reproached by them 

 as not worthy to be called a master. Among domestic customs, again, 

 who, if he had been set to imagine all possible anomalies, would have 

 hit upon that which is found among the Basques, and has existed 

 among other races the custom that on the birth of a child the hus- 

 band goes to bed and receives the congratulations of friends, while his 

 wife returns to her household work? Or who>, among the results of 

 having a son born, would dream of that which occurs among some 

 Polynesian races, where the father is forthwith dispossessed of his 

 property, and becomes simply a guardian of it on behalf of the in- 

 fant ? The varieties of filial relations and of accompanying senti- 

 ments continually show us things equally strange, and at first sight 

 equally unaccountable. It seems hardly credible that it should any- 

 where be thought a duty on the part of children to bury their parents 

 alive. Yet it is so thought among the Fijians ; of whom we read also 

 that the parents thus put out of the way, go to their graves with smiling 



1 Lubbock's " Prehistoric Times," p. 344 (first edition). 



8 Mrs. Atkinson's "Recollections of Tartar Steppes," p. 220. 



