254 



HAUNTS AND HOBBIES 



father." Seeing my look of surprise, the head of the 

 office then explained. He informed me that in that 

 region the brothers of a family have among them but 

 one wife. The woman whom the eldest brother 

 marries becomes also the wife of the other brothers, 

 and the children who may be born regard all the 

 brothers as equally their fathers, distinguishing them 

 according to their age, as thus : eldest, second, or other 

 father. 



This custom of " polyandrism," as it is termed, pre- 

 vails in other parts of the Himalaya, also, I believe, 

 in some places in Southern India ; and it is supposed 

 to have prevailed in past ages even in Europe. Many 

 theories have been advanced to account for the exist- 

 ence of the custom in these mountains and elsewhere 

 in the Himalaya, but none of these theories are satis- 

 factory, for they leave altogether unexplained one 

 remarkable fact. It is this. The custom prevails 

 only in small isolated tracts such as this, but it is 

 utterly unknown in all the extensive regions by 

 which these small tracts are surrounded, and yet the 

 populations where the custom exists, and where it 

 does not, are of the same race, of the same re- 

 ligion, and live under precisely the same conditions 

 of life. 



It might be supposed that the custom, to our ideas 

 so repellent, would have a deteriorating moral effect 

 on the people among whom it prevailed ; but, so far 

 as I saw and heard, this did not appear to me to be 

 the case. The people of this small tract were not 

 more criminal, nor, so far as I could ascertain, in any 



