In the time of Marco Polo the Tartars of Asia celebrated marriages that were more singular still—the marriages of deceased children. The families drew up the contract as if their children had been living, solemnly celebrated a symbolic wedding, then burned not less solemnly the fictitious contract, which would be, they thought, the means of holding it good in the other world for the vanished young couple. Thenceforward an alliance existed between the contracting families as if the marriage had been real.[1]
Among the Reddies of India a young woman from sixteen to twenty years old is frequently married to a little boy of five or six. The wife then goes to live either with the father, or with an uncle, or a maternal cousin of her future husband. The children resulting from these extra-*conjugal unions are attributed to the boy, who is reputed to be the legal husband. When once this boy has reached manhood his legitimate wife is old, and then he in his turn unites himself to the wife of another boy, for whom he also raises up pseudo-legitimate children.[2]
Child-marriages, at least of little girls, are still very common in India amongst the Brahmins, and it is not unusual to see sexagenarian Brahmins marry little girls of six or seven years, for whom they pay money.[3]
On this point, as on most others, our European ancestors have not been more delicate than the savage or barbarous races of other countries. Thus Plutarch tells us that in ancient Italy the girls were often married before the age of twelve years, but that they did not become wives before that age.[4]
At the present day the Russian peasants still frequently act like the Reddies of India, and it is not rare to see, under the Mir system, young boys of eight or ten years married to women of twenty-five or thirty. Very often, in this case, the chief of the family becomes the effective husband of the woman while the legal husband is growing up.[5]
