journeys, takes care to have a wife in every place at which he stops.[1]
The polygamic régime is also in great honour in the Mongolian archipelagoes of Asia, in the Palos Islands, in the Caroline Islands, etc. Among the Battas of Sumatra it evidently begins to be distasteful to the women, since the polygamous husband is obliged to assign to each of his wives a special hearth, and kitchen utensils of her own, with which she prepares her food apart, or with that of her husband, when she is on duty, and required by the master.[2]
In this chapter I confine myself to primitive polygamy, to that of the grossest savages or barbarians; but there are barbarians of every race and colour, and the roots of all superior civilisations necessarily go far down into primitive savagery. Now we have seen that the polygamic régime is prevalent throughout the world among races that are little cultivated; we may hence conclude that the most civilised nations must have begun with polygamy, and, in reality, it has been thus everywhere and always. In the various civilised societies, living or dead, marriage has commenced by being polygamous. It is a law which has few exceptions.
In ancient Peru, the Incas decreed monogamy to be obligatory for the lower classes. The Chinese attribute to Fo-Hi, their first sovereign, the institution of marriage. This legendary king is said to have raised them out of promiscuity. Such also was the rôle of Cecrops, in Greece, and the same thing happened in primitive India. About thirty years ago a number of erudite Europeans, especially the mythologists and linguists, were smitten with a blind love for the Indian hymns of the Rig-Veda. They set to work to torture these old Sanscrit texts, naturally obscure, and by subjecting them to a sort of linguistic examination, they wrung from them imaginary revelations. It was decided that a unique and marvellous race, primitively endowed with every virtue and capacity, had sprung up one fine day on some plateau or other of Central Asia. The most enthusiastic of them generously endowed these
