214 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



one widow. She is wife to both, and any child she may have belongs 

 to both. There are cases in which a husband connives at a connection 

 between his wife and another man. This is not counted adultery, for 

 it is an open transaction ; and it is not polyandry, for the parties are 

 not counted husband and wife. It is not considered respectable." 



The existence of polyandry is not denied, but I venture to hazard 

 the assertion that it is not the system of marriage in any tribe at 

 the present day, and it seems to me impossible that it could have 

 been the rule of marriage anywhere at any time in the past. The 

 mere arithmetical difficulty in the way appears to me to be insur- 

 mountable. 



Though such statistics as I have been able to get at among the 

 lately heathen tribes in Fee jee directly contradict the hypothesis, still I 

 think we may suppose that the number of males generally exceeds that 

 of females among the lower savages. But it does not seem to have 

 occurred to Mr. McLennan to consider how great his theory of polyan- 

 dry as a system of marriage requires that disparity to be. Under such 

 a system it is evident that, whatever the average number of husbands 

 to a wife maybe, at least so many times more numerous must the 

 men be than the women. If y be the number of women, and x their 

 average allowance of husbands ; then, since we can not suppose that 

 under such a system any marriageable girl would be allowed to roam 

 in " maiden meditation fancy free," the number of men in the tribe 

 must be x y, even supposing all the men to be absorbed in the " com- 

 binations of husbands." 



Nor will marriage by capture help us here ; because, for every 

 woman stolen there must have been x husbands left lamenting, unless 

 we suppose that a non-polyandrous tribe was kept in the neighborhood 

 of each polyandrous tribe for its convenience, and that they never 

 retaliated upon their aggressive neighbors. 



To sum up : It has been shown that Mr. McLennan's postulate of 

 female infanticide as the rule among the lower savages can not easily 

 be granted ; that his exogamous tribes are not exogamous in the sense 

 which his theory requires ; and that both marriage by capture and 

 polyandry, as systems of marriage, involve something which has all 

 the appearance of an absurdity. Without claiming too much, then, I 

 think it may be said that the basis of Mr. McLennan's theory has been 

 shown to be insecure. And this being so, it is all the greater pity that 

 he allowed himself to treat with such contemptuous scorn the hy- 

 pothesis advanced by Mr. Morgan in his work on " Systems of Con- 

 sanguinity," * which hypothesis is opposed to his own. 



" This wild dream not to say nightmare of early institutions . . 

 . . It seemed worth while to take the trouble to show its utterly un- 



* " Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family," " Smithsonian Con- 

 tributions to Knowledge," vol. xvii. 



