exceptional, but polygamy has been very common, at least a gross polygamy, not regulated in any way, and merely resulting from the monopoly of the women by the strongest or the richest men. It has been a sort of conjugal anarchy, admitting simultaneously of various matrimonial forms, as polyandry, term marriage, experimental marriage, etc., during periods of more or less length.
Besides their primordial rôle as child-bearers, wives were found very useful in other ways—either for the satisfaction of sensual desires, or for the execution of a number of painful labours; and therefore men endeavoured to procure as many of them as possible, first by capture, and then by purchase, or by giving a certain amount of work in submitting to a temporary servitude. In the preceding chapter I have given the history of this primitive, savage polygamy which as yet no law regulated. During the first phases of their social evolution, all the human races have practised, with more or less brutality, this gross polygamy. We have seen—and it is a subject to which I shall have to return—how, in the bosom of the polygamic régime, monogamic tendencies have appeared, which by degrees have ended by prevailing amongst all the more civilised races. These races have resigned themselves to adopt monogamy, or at least legal monogamy. I say "resigned," for it seems that monogamy costs much to man; in reality laws and customs have everywhere attenuated the severity of it for him by various compromises of which I shall soon have to speak. II. Arab Polygamy.
However, among the superior races, there is one, the Arab race, which, up to our own time, has maintained and legalised the polygamic régime, while propagating and regulating it among the various peoples that have come under its domination. If, in this respect, the Arab race has been an exception to the general evolution, it is not because it is less gifted than the others; it has sufficiently proved this. According to the ancients, a fantastic fish,
