OF TIIE HUMAN FAMILY. 477 



and limits of its influence must be ascertained before other causes of the origin of 

 the system are sought ; and it is further important in order to show that the true 

 causes must be found in a state of society which existed antecedently to the intro- 

 duction of both polygamy and polyandria. Polygamy may claim the position of a 

 domestic institution. In its highest and regulated form it presupposes a consider- 

 able advance of society, together with the development of superior and inferior 

 classes, and of some kinds of wealth. The means of subsistence must have become 

 enlarged as well as stable, and individual ownership of property recognized, before 

 a single person would be able to maintain more than one household, or several sets 

 of children by several different mothers. In its high form it must have been 

 limited to the privileged few, whilst the mass of the people were debarred, by 

 poverty, from its practice. In a lower and unregulated form it has probably pre 

 vailed from a very early period in man's history. Polyandria, on the other hand, is 

 scarcely entitled to the rank of a domestic institution. It is an excrescence of 

 polygamy, and its repulsive converse. Traces of it have been found in many 

 polygamous nations in various parts of Asia, in Africa, and, according to Hearne 

 and Humboldt, in occasional instances in North and South America. The countries 

 in which it has prevailed most extensively, as is well known, are Thibet, and the 

 Nilgherry Hills of South India. It presupposes either a scarcity of unappropriated 

 females, or of the means of subsistence, or of both together. The Thibetan 

 polyandria, where several brothers possess one wife in common, is the highest form 

 of the usage ; and the lowest, that in the Nilgherry Hills, where several unrelated 

 persons possess one wife in common. There are no reasons for supposing that the 

 mass of the people in any country were involved in the practice of these customs, 

 after polygamy had become a settled usage, although their joint existence in a 

 particular nation would be a most unfavorable indication of the condition of the 

 remainder of the people. There is no evidence that polyandria was ever an esta- 

 blished practice of the American aborigines. On the contrary there are reasons 

 which render its practice improbable. The females are usually more numerous 

 than the males from the destruction of the latter in war. 1 Polygamy has prevailed 

 among them very generally, and is still practised; but it is under a permanent 

 check amongst the greater portion of the people from the inability of an individual 

 to support more than one set of children. Consequently throughout this family 

 there never has been a necessity for the practice of polyandria. 



With respect to the influence of general polygamy upon the formation of the 

 system it is very slight ; but there is a special form of this usage existing in theory, 

 and to some extent in practice, in the Ganowanian family, which reaches some of 

 the domestic relationships. It embraces all of the influence of general polygamy, 

 and also reaches beyond it. When a man marries the eldest daughter he becomes, 

 by that act, entitled to each and all of her sisters as wives when they severally 

 attain the marriageable age. The option rests with him, and he may enforce the 



1 In some nations, as the Blackloot and the Shiyann, they are said to be two to one. 



