is thus widely distributed in India. It also exists among the Calmucks, the Australians, and the Iroquois. Humboldt found it among the Avanos and Maypures Indians of the Orinoco, and attributed it to a scarcity of women.
Both forms exist among the Eskimos of Boothia,[1] and in Ceylon. Of the latter, Sirr says:[2] "Although when polyandry is indulged in by the highest caste the husbands are usually brothers, still a man can, with the consent of his wife, bring home another, unrelated to him, who has all the marital rights, and is called an associated husband. In fact, the first husband can bring home as many men as his wife will consent to receive as husbands, and these marriages are recognized by the Kandian laws." Sirr saw a Kandian matron of high caste who was the wife of eight husbands who were brothers. In his time polyandry was limited to the province of Kandy; but Tennant tells us[3] that it was at one time universal throughout the island, and was extinguished in the maritime provinces by the influence of the Portuguese and Dutch. Here, too, we find that the men are more numerous than the women. By the census of 1821 the number of males exceeded by twenty thousand that of the females. In one district there were only fifty-five women to every hundred men.[4]
Erman tells us that polyandry exists in the Aleutian Islands, and among the Koriaks to the north of the Okhotsk Sea, but does not say which form of it. It also exists in western Eskimo Land, among the Garos of the Himalayas, and the Smerenkur Gilyaks in the southeastern corner of Siberia, but the exact form of it is left in doubt.[5]
We thus find polyandry existing in the present century in each quarter of the globe. That it should exist at all, considering that the conditions which gave rise to it have almost universally passed away, and that the practice itself is manifestly to the disadvantage of the males, is a matter for surprise, and is a fresh proof of how enduring is custom. Of its existence in other localities in the past we also have direct evidence.
According to Polybius, polyandry was practiced in ancient Greece, and in the twelfth book we read that it was an old established custom in Sparta, where the brothers of a house often had one wife between them. That it existed among the Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain, the well-known passage in Caesar proves: "Uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes, et
- ↑ Sir J. Ross's Narrative, vol. i, p. S35; vol. ii, p. 43.
- ↑ Ceylon and the Cingalese, vol. ii, p. 162.
- ↑ Ceylon, vol. ii, p. 428.
- ↑ Heber's Journal, vol. ii, pp. 518, 519.
- ↑ See Journal of the Anthropological Society, London, 1865, p. cccvi; Hooker's Himalayan Journals, vol. ii, p. 273; and Lansdell's Through Siberia, vol. ii, p. 225.
