TJie Ethnology of India. 135 



European fashion. It is also a general observation that in all hilly and 

 broken countries (such as are the Western Grhats 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, 

 viz., 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 



