1 84 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



" which is not practised among the Kamtchadals. 

 They pay not the least attention to the degrees of 

 relationship," except that of parent and child. 1 The 

 hospitable rite so common among peoples in the lower 

 culture of offering a temporary consort to a guest is 

 practised by the Aleutian Islanders. If we may 

 believe Georgi marriage is merely a provisional 

 cohabitation in which the partner is often changed. 

 The women are as much free and mistresses of them- 

 selves as the men. A wife deserted or exchanged 

 sometimes returns more than once to her first husband. 

 " These islanders in the married state are above 

 jealousy and ignore the rights of an exclusive and 

 reciprocal property between the spouses. The men 

 leave their wives in entire liberty, and the latter do as 

 much for their husbands/' Degrees of kinship are 

 ignored; they only marry " to find subsistence with 

 less trouble and to fulfil the end of nature." 2 



Returning to the mainland, the great desire of the 

 Buryats of Southern Siberia is for children. If one 

 wife be unfruitful a second and a third are married, 

 and so on. In default of children of their own they 

 adopt strangers. Nor is this all. Partly to make sure 

 of children, partly to have a woman in the house to 

 fulfil womanly duties, they marry their sons at a very 

 tender age to grown-up women. " I have often," says 

 Melnikov, " met a youth of fifteen or sixteen who in 

 answer to my inquiry whether he had been long 

 married would answer that the knot had been tied 

 three or four years before. In the wedomstwa of 

 Unga in the department of Balagan I once saw a 

 Buryat of sixteen who had been married seven years 



1 Georgi, 75, 89, 90. 2 Id. 116, 129, 130. Cf. 128. 



