tant questions connected with the development of social organization in early communities are involved. The evidence, therefore, ought to be of the very strongest, and the witnesses fully competent to deal with the facts they narrate.
In forming our opinions as to the customs of savage tribes, in all cases where the significance of a custom depends upon something underlying the visible facts, the accounts given by travelers must be received with caution. They may state quite correctly each fact they observe, but they are very likely to be wrong in their interpretation of its meaning. No witness here is to be trusted unless he has had very full opportunities of making himself acquainted with that which underlies the custom he describes. This caution has a special application to evidence as to polyandry; for, as Sir John Lubbock justly observes, "When our information is incomplete, it must often be far from easy to distinguish between communal marriage and true polyandry."[1] Thus Mr. Schurmann, who happened to observe two Australian blacks living with one woman in common between them, records this as an instance of polyandry, whereas we know that it was nothing more than an instance of group-marriage. So also the practice of the "imported laborers"[2] in Feejee at the present day might well be set down as polyandry, if we did not know what is beneath the outer fact. There is an exceptional scarcity of women among them, many more males than females being imported; and so a woman may be seen cohabiting with a number of men. But we have had more than one shocking proof that this seeming polyandry is only group-marriage in difficulties, women who admitted men of a forbidden class having been put to death by their countrymen for the offense; and the murderers have declared that they were under obligation to kill them.
Not a few of Mr. McLennan's instances of so-called polyandry admit of a similar explanation; and even those cases on which he seems chiefly to depend—the Nair and the Thibetan—are anything but conclusive in his favor. The Nair polyandry, according to the account of it given by Mr. McLennan himself in quotation from Hamilton, Buchanan, and the "Asiatic Researches,"[3] is evidently group-marriage. A Nair woman has "a combination of husbands," but "a Nair may be one in several combinations of husbands—that is, he may have any number of wives." Group-marriage might well be described in these very words. That the Nairs are divided into exogamous clans is certain from the fact that cohabitation is regulated by "certain restrictions as to tribe and caste," the plain meaning of which is that there are certain "tribes or castes" which do not intermarry; and the
