perfectible, that it results from social life, and is only to be taken together with the other needs, desires, and necessities of the struggle for existence. Our moral sentiments are simply habits incarnate in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act reputed culpable at Paris or at London may be and frequently is held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin. In order to judge impartially of polyandric marriage we must remember these elementary truths. Not, certainly, that polyandry is rare amongst us, but it is censured, counted as criminal, and obliged to hide itself. The legal and regulated possession, publicly acknowledged, of one woman by several men, who are all husbands by the same title, shocks our feelings and morality extremely in the present day.
Nevertheless, human societies, small or large, must and will live, and it is an imperious condition which imposes the polyandric régime, namely, a considerable inequality between the number of men and that of women. Now, this disproportion may result from divers causes. In the first place, it may be natural, as it is among certain animal species. Among the lepidoptera, for example, nine hundred and thirty-four males have been counted as against seven hundred and sixty-one females.[1] Although smaller, the disproportion is not less real amongst mankind. As a general rule, and in nearly all countries where it has been possible to ascertain it, the relation between masculine and feminine births gives a certain excess of boys. This relation has been found in Europe to be 106 for 70 million of births; but our great masculine mortality re-establishes the equilibrium in the early years of life. The proportion of births, besides, is far from being identical in all the countries of Europe, and we even find oscillations in a given country. In England it is generally 104.5, in France 106.3, in Russia 108.9, at Philadelphia 110.5. In certain ethnic or social categories the proportion of masculine births notably augments. It rises to 113 for the Jews of Russia, to 114 for those of Breslau, to 120 for the Jews of Livonia. More singular still, the proportion of masculine to feminine births augments for certain professions; it is, for example, higher amongst the
- ↑ Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 278.
