Among various peoples funeral sacrifices are replaced by mutilations more or less voluntary, and especially obligatory on widows. As examples, I may mention the amputation of the little finger by the Hottentots, the Melanesians, and the Charruas; and the gashes which Polynesian widows made on their faces and bodies. These bloody demonstrations were obligatory, and far from corresponding to a real grief. At Noukahiva Porter saw a widow, the funeral wounds still fresh on her neck, breast, and arms, prostitute herself to American sailors.[1]
This review of savage manners and customs in regard to widows has only been a long enumeration of cruelties and iniquities, and these, although much lessened in barbarous countries, do not, by any means, disappear.
II. Widowhood in Barbarous Countries.
The natives of Himalayan Bhootan are sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, and sometimes polyandrous, and these variations naturally affect the conditions of widowhood. Among the monogamous and polygamous, the widows can only marry again after a delay of three years. This regulation, which we have already found among the Redskins, has doubtless been dictated by the same reasons; and taken with many other similarities existing in very dissimilar races and countries, it tends to prove that scientific sociology can be more than a mere name or imagination. In the Himalayan Bhootan, a widow who has no repugnance to polygamy has many chances of marrying again, if she has a younger sister still free, whom the new husband can marry at the same time.[2] In polyandrous families there can hardly be any real widowhood for the woman. Thus, at Ladak, if the eldest brother, the husband in chief, happens to die, his property, authority, and share of the wife pass to the next brother, whether the latter be or not one of the husbands.[3] This is a sort of levirate which naturally exists in polyandrous households,
