NAIR AND DIERI MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 717 



Burn Cas (or to burn Atnamuth). 



See Almoi. 



Hear Atahaijaig. 



Simple Sentence. 



Ak Dr. Fraser, Ekaihenc Dear Dr. Fraser, I com- 



vai encainyak um ika etmu passionate you, and express 



acisyialwainauritaiunyum the desire that Jehovali 



a Jehovah va nimaihpas may bless your labours to 



yin. his own glory. 



10.— THE NAIR POLYANDRY AND THE DIERI 

 PIRAURU. 



By LORIMER FISON, M.A., Fellow of Queen's College, 

 Unii'ersity of Melbourne. 



Mr. J. F. M'Lennan, who has a considerable number of 

 followers, treats marriage by capture as an actual system of 

 marriage among early tribes, and Polyandry as a large factor in 

 ancient society. The former of these has nothing really to 

 do with polyandry, but the two are so involved in Mr. 

 M'Lennan's argument that it may be as well to clear it out 

 of our way. The practice of Exogamy, he says — i.e., the rule 

 forbidding marriage within certain limits — compelled men to 

 go outside their tribes for their wives ; and, as " the relations 

 of separate tribes in a rude state of society are uniformly, or 

 almost uniformly hostile," the only way in which men could 

 get wives was by capturing them. Capture, therefore, was 

 " the necessary preliminary to marriage." Polyandry, Mr. 

 M'Lennan says, arose from the practice of female infanticide, 

 " which rendered women scarce." These statements appear 

 to me to be altogether mistaken, for the following reasons : — 



1. In the first place, exogamy does not compel men to go 

 to hostile tribes for their wives. Savage people, as a general 

 rule, are made up of exogamous divisions, but the divisions 

 interoaarry one with another, and a man has no need to go to 

 an enemy's camp for a wife. He will kill his enemy if he can, 

 and capture his wives, but he is not driven to the act by an 

 impossibility of getting a wife from among his own people. 



2. In the second place, if Mr. M'Lennan's theory were 

 correct, each tribe would have to capture all the women of 

 the other, and its own women would have to be all captured 

 by the other tribe ; which, as Euklid says, is absurd. Never- 



