The Ethnology of India. 135 
European fashion. It is also a general observation that in all hilly and 
broken countries (such as are the Western Ghats and their spurs on 
either side) village communities are neither required, nor can be easily 
formed. In the midst of great plain countries, the cultivation of a 
community is concentrated within fixed and not distant limits, and 
concentration of habitation is required for defence. In hilly countries, 
the occasional spaces fit for cultivation are occupied by petty scattered 
hamlets and individual habitations. 
I have never heard any attempt to account for the singular poly- 
andry of the Nairs. My impression, however, is that polyandry is 
only a step in advance of the custom which is well-known as existing 
both among the old Jews and among almost. all those modern Hindu 
tribes which permit remarriage, as well as among some other races, 
yiz,, that the wife of one brother passes on his decease to the next 
brother. Among the Jats, the men strenuously assert this right, and 
the women generally as strenuously deny it ; but as we do not enforce 
it, it has never been decided which is in the right. At any rate it is 
always asserted. Now when the woman is recognised to be family 
property, and when moreover the Hindu and older than Hindu doctrine 
of joint family property is brought to bear on the matter, it seems 
to require but a little pressure and a little philosophy to convert a 
successive holding into a joint contemporaneous holding; especially 
when childless elder brothers are getting old, and younger brothers 
are rising up who may supply the want. In an early state of society, 
we know that in war the women are always carried off as the prize 
of the victors ; consequently, as the fortune of war varies, tribes must 
often be left with a deficiency of women to an inconvenient degree, 
which the polyandrical arrangement among brothers (already pos- 
sessed of contingent remainders in the same woman) obviates. This 
result seems to have followed among some of the Scythian tribes, and 
there is a tendency to the same thing among some of the Arian tribes 
of the Himalayas. In this last case, the cause assigned often is, that 
the women being good-looking and much prized in the plains, fathers 
have great temptations to make advantageous matches for their 
daughters (to sell them, rude people say), and women become scarce 
in the hills. 
We may suppose that the Nairs were perhaps a tribe who had 
