OK POLYANDRY. 801 



the purpose of fastening these skirts behind ; the curiously cut 

 collar keeps the now misplaced notches made to allow of its be- . 

 ing worn turned up or down ; the smart facings represent the old 

 ordinary lining ; and the sham cuffs, now made with a seam about 

 the wrist, are survivals from real cuffs, when the sleeves used to 

 be turned back," 



We have tried to show that, while three motives have been in- 

 fluential in dress development, the desire for ornament has been 

 the most powerful ; that shame for nudeness, though sometimes 

 acting, has been least potent ; that two types of dress have been 

 developed ; and that our dress is a combination of these two. We 

 have claimed that the desire for dress has urged on man's mental 

 progress, leading to a search for materials and to development of 

 the arts whereby they are made of service. We have considered 

 some examples of dress of no mean workmanship made by low 

 and barbarous tribes. We have inquired how the forms of gar- 

 ments came to be what they are, and have seen that in our own 

 dress much that is useless survives from the past. 



-+*+- 



ON POLYANDRY. 



By Lieutenant-Colonel A. B. ELLIS. 



THE numerous examples of the forms of marriage by capture 

 which we gave in a former paper in The Popular Science 

 Monthly will have shown how almost universal the practice of 

 taking wives by violence from other groups must have been in 

 primitive times a practice which, it may be remembered, we at- 

 tributed to a prevailing scarcity of women. In the present paper 

 we purpose showing that we were right in predicating of the 

 primitive groups that they usually contained fewer women than 

 men, by adducing evidence of the exceedingly wide distribution 

 of polyandry, a system which can only be attributed to a scarcity 

 of women ; for it is inconceivable that men should have volun- 

 tarily initiated a form of marriage under which two, three, or 

 more men sometimes as many as seven or eight would be the 

 associated husbands of one woman, if there was a possibility of 

 their obtaining a wife apiece. Even if, by doing violence to our 

 common sense, we suppose such a thing to be possible on the part 

 of the men, how would the women submit to a state of affairs 

 which would compel at least three women out of every four, sup- 

 posing the sexes to be equally balanced, to remain unmarried ? 

 It is obvious, however, that polyandry could in its origin only be 

 induced by necessity. There must have been fewer much fewer 

 women than men ; and as experience and observation show that 

 vol. xxxix. 58 



