CHAPTER VIII.
PRIMITIVE POLYGAMY.
I. Polygamy in Oceania, Africa, and America.—Polygamy and sociability—Polygamy in Australia, in New Caledonia, and at Fiji—The legitimate wife and concubines at Fiji—Polygamy among the Hottentots and Kaffirs—Economic reasons of polygamy in Africa—Brutality of husbands on the Gaboon—Polygamy limited by the law of supply and demand—Its effects on the morality of women—Commercial fidelity—Mumbo Jumbo—Love unknown in black Africa—Legal marriage with the Bongos at Madagascar—Hierarchical polygamy at Madagascar—Polygamy in Polynesia, in America—Jealousy unknown to the female savage—The sister-wives among the Redskins—Religion sanctifies polygamy—Monogamic tendencies in America.
II. Polygamy in Asia and in Europe.—Polygamy among the aborigines of India, in Bootan, among the Ostiaks and the Battas—Universality of primitive polygamy—Polygamy of the ancient Peruvians, Chinese, and Vedic Aryans—Polygamy among the Gauls and the Germans—Causes of primitive polygamy—Its evolution.
I. Polygamy in Oceania, Africa, and America.
We have seen that in the animal kingdom species are sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, but that in general a gregarious life, a life in association, favours polygamy. Now, man is surely the most sociable of animals, therefore he is much inclined to polygamy, like the great anthropoid apes, with whom our primitive ancestors must have had more than one analogy. We have already spoken of the causes which in human societies of the earliest ages disturbed the normal relation of the sexes, or the approximate equilibrium between the number of men and that of women. We have seen how savage life rapidly uses up the men to such a degree that often, in spite of the custom of female infanticide, there is still an excess of women sufficient to impose polygamy. Although primitive morality may not think in the least of blaming the plurality of wives, it yet happens that this polygamy, to which all men aspire in a savage country, is spontaneously restricted; and, as with chimpanzees, and for the same reasons, it becomes, in fact, the privilege of a small number of the strongest and the most feared, the chiefs, the sorcerers, or the priests, when there are any.
In Australia, for example, the adult men take possession of the women of all ages, and in consequence the greater number of young men cannot become proprietors of a woman before the age of about thirty years.[339]
Enforced celibacy is, besides, softened by the complaisance of the men already provided for, the husbands, if we may so call them, who are generous to the other men, and much more jealous of their rights of property than of their conjugal rights. It is easy to have an understanding with them, and, with the aid of a suitable present, to induce them to lend their wives. In New Caledonia the chiefs and rich men only can indulge in the luxury of polygamy, and in this archipelago the plurality of wives has already the character that it nearly always assumes in a primitive country. If the New Caledonians ardently desire to have several wives it is not generally with a sensual aim, for among the Canaks the genetic appetite is little developed; their reasons are of quite another kind. Neither slavery nor domesticity yet exist in New Caledonia. However, agriculture is already practised there, and this requires hard labour, from which the men, especially the chief men, like to exonerate themselves. Now, it is polygamy that furnishes the Canaks with servile labour, which they cannot do without; it exactly replaces slavery. Therefore, every man, of however little importance he may be, procures a number of women in proportion to the extent of the land he has in cultivation, and also to the figure he must make in the world. We shall find this servile polygamy in many other countries, notably among the Fijians, who resemble the New Caledonians, but at Fiji polygamy had already evolved and become complicated. It was accompanied by concubinage. As we shall see later, this is generally the case. Nowhere do we find men passing abruptly from polygamy to monogamy, and long before arriving at the latter, when first custom and then law restrains and regulates the loose polygamy of the earlier ages, the change is only at first effected in the form; a man has a small number of wives, who, with their children, enjoy certain privileges, but by the side of these titular wives he possesses concubines in greater or less number. In this manner everything is reconciled—morality with sensuality, and the family with the interests of property.
This régime was already in force among the Melanesians of the Fiji Isles, where the chiefs, living in great state, acquired in one way or another three or four hundred women, of whom the greater number filled only the position of servants to the master, and at the same time of concubines, who were at the disposition of the warriors or of the guests. The wives whose children inherited were very few in number. They were daughters of chiefs, and their situation, although less degraded than that of the concubines, was still very humble. Not only did they resign themselves without difficulty to polygamy, but they were subjected to a singular duty—that of rearing for their husband a chosen concubine. The fact is curious, and worth the trouble of narrating. “The bride takes with her a young girl who is still a child, but who promises to be beautiful, and who has been carefully selected from the lower class of the people. It is a virgin destined for her husband. She brings her up with the tenderest solicitude, and when the girl is marriageable, the queen, on an appointed day, undresses her, washes her carefully, and even pours perfumed oil on her hair, crowns her with flowers, conducts her thus naked to her husband, presents her to him, and retires in silence.”[340] Excessive as it seems to us, this absolute resignation is quite natural among savages.
In primitive countries the married woman—that is to say, the woman belonging to a man—has herself the conscience of being a thing, a property (it is proved to her often and severely enough), but she does not think of retaliating, especially in what concerns the conjugal relations. Moreover, as her condition is oftenest that of a slave over-burdened with work, not only does she not resent the introduction of other women in the house of the master, but she desires it, for the work will be so much the less for herself. Thus among the Zulus the wife first purchased strives and works with ardour in the hope of furnishing her husband with means to acquire a second wife—a companion in misery over whom, by right of seniority, she will have the upper hand.[341]
In consequence of this the greater number of the men in Kaffirland have two or three wives, and hence a certain scarcity of feminine merchandise in the country; the young men have difficulty in providing for themselves, and many girls are sold from infancy.[342] The same customs prevail with the Hottentots; and both Kaffirs and Hottentots esteem the monogamic preaching of the Christian missionaries as very impertinent, and on this point both men and women are agreed.[343]
Along the whole course of the Zambesi, says Livingstone, the number of wives are the measure of a man’s riches, and the women are the first to find this quite natural.
It is important to observe that in savage societies the woman could not live independently; for her, celibacy is synonymous with desertion, and desertion would mean a speedy death. This is even the reason of the levirate, of which I shall have to speak later.
As for all the negroes of Africa, whatever the degree of their civilisation or savagery, they have not even a suspicion of the monogamic régime. But, in Africa also, sensuality is only one of the secondary causes of the plurality of wives so strongly desired by all the blacks. Their polygamy is chiefly founded on economic motives. At the Gaboon,[344] says Du Chaillu, the supreme ambition of a man is to possess a great number of wives. Nothing is of more value to him, for they cultivate the ground, and their strict duty is to serve him and furnish him with food. The wife is always purchased from her father at a price agreed on, and often from her earliest infancy. In this case she is placed under the care of the husband’s chief wife. The husband-proprietor does not interfere at all with the agricultural labour executed by the wives; he only requires them to supply him with food. If he has bought them, it is merely as a profitable investment. He consequently treats them as slaves, or as domestic animals, and has no scruple in lashing them with a whip for nothing at all, and thus causing ineffaceable scars. “I have seen very few women,” says Du Chaillu, “who had not traces of this kind on their bodies.”
The whip which serves for these conjugal corrections has a double thong, made of hippopotamus or sea-cow hide. “You should hear,” says the traveller, “the worthy husband cry out—‘Ah, wretch! do you think I have bought you for nothing?’”[345] The Gaboon tribes, of whom Du Chaillu speaks, are reckoned the least civilised of negroes; but even among the least gross of African races the conjugal régime and the degree of subjection imposed on women are scarcely lessened.
At Tchaki, and at Badagry, etc., when Clapperton spoke of English monogamy to the natives, all his auditors, without distinction of sex, burst into a laugh,[346] so absurd did the thing appear to them. Throughout Africa the number of a man’s wives is only limited by his resources. If, as Schweinfurth tells us, among the Bongos of the upper Nile, a man rarely has more than three wives, it is simply on account of the strict law of supply and demand; for a woman costs no less than ten iron plates, each weighing about two pounds, to which must be added twenty iron spear heads, all precious articles and not easily procured.[347] At Bornou also men in easy circumstances have seldom more than three wives; and the poor have to content themselves, whether they will or not, with monogamy.[348] But among the negroes of Kaarta and the Fantis of the coast of Guinea polygamy is excessive. In Kaarta a private individual often has ten wives and as many concubines; but princes or knights often have threefold or even tenfold that number.[349] In consequence of this, about a third of the inhabitants are of princely or royal blood. As for the Fantis, polygamy is a source of riches, not only through the labour of the women, but also through the sale of the children, of whom a large and profitable trade is made.[350] This trait of morals is not in the least peculiar to them; throughout black Africa the right of the father of a family includes that of selling the children, and he exercises it without scruple.
Naturally the last sentiments we may expect to find in African households are those of delicacy or moral nobility. Humble to servility in presence of the master, the women give the rein to their shameless excesses as soon as they can do it without danger.
In Bornou a wife never approaches her husband without kneeling.[351] When a Poul orders one of his wives to prepare his supper, which implies that the master desires her company for the night, this signal favour is received with transports of joy. The chosen wife hastens to obey, and when the repast is ready she proudly goes to seek the master, thus humiliating her female colleagues, who retreat in confusion to their cabins to await their turn.[352] But all this abject behaviour is merely by compulsion, and the women recoup themselves well for it whenever they have the chance.
The poor women of the Gaboon, who are lacerated by whips for no offence, do not understand chastity, and their intrigues constantly provoke conflicts and palavers between the men of the villages.[353] The obscenity of the Monboottoo women astonished Schweinfurth, well acquainted as he was with negro customs.[354] The Bambarra women easily forget conjugal fidelity for a bead necklace, a fine waist-cloth, etc.; and, as in so many other countries, the husband-proprietors have no scruple in hiring out their wives for a sufficient price.[355]
Nevertheless, unauthorised adultery is cruelly punished throughout Africa; but fear is powerless to ensure to the negro husbands the purely commercial fidelity they exact from their wives, and therefore, in order to correct feminine morals, they have recourse in certain parts to fantastic methods—to the Mumbo Jumbo which Mungo Park describes.[356] Strangely attired and unrecognisable, a singular personage, doubtless a sorcerer, appears in the evening after being called for by frightful howlings in the woods, and first goes to the spot where the inhabitants are accustomed to assemble to talk at their ease. This coming is the signal for songs and dances, which last into the middle of the night. Then the Mumbo Jumbo designates the guilty or indocile woman. The latter is immediately seized, stripped, bound to a stake, and vigorously beaten by the Mumbo himself, amid the acclamations and laughter of the assembly, and especially of the other women.
In all negro Africa the husbands are generally strangers to the jealousy of honour which exists among the intelligent husbands of civilised countries. They do not care for moral fidelity, based on affection and free choice. The Kaffir woman, Schouter tells us, is the ox of her husband. A Kaffir said one day, speaking of his wife, “I have bought her, therefore it is her duty to work.”
“The negro,” relates another traveller (Monteiro), “knows neither love, affection, nor jealousy. During the many years that I have spent in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the least tenderness for a woman—put his arms around her, give or receive a caress, denoting some degree of affection or love on one side or the other.... They have no word in their language to signify love or affection.”[357]
A French traveller says also of the Malagasies, “Modesty and jealousy are two sentiments very little developed among the Malagasies of both sexes and all ranks. They push licence very far in their manners, but quite unconsciously.”[358]
Throughout black Africa, indeed, marriage does not exist, at least in the sense we attach to the word. It is not a civil institution, much less a sacrament; it is a bargain, delivering the woman to the mercy of the buyer. Here and there, however, we see dawnings of legal marriage—that is to say, a contract sanctioned by civil authority. Among the Bongos of the upper Nile, for example, a man who wishes to procure a certain woman generally applies to the chief or to some dignitary, who enforces his demand.[359]
With the Malagasies, where the social organisation is much more complex and quasi feudal, there is already a veritable civil marriage. The future pair, accompanied by their parents, go before the judge or the chief of the village, declare their intentions, pay the Hasina, or matrimonial tax, and the union is concluded. As is the case in many countries, Malagasian polygamy already tends towards monogamy. At Madagascar, as in China, rich men have one chief wife, who has a house to herself and other privileges; but by the side of the titular wife there are lesser wives.[360] I shall have to return to this hierarchical polygamy, which forms a sort of evolutionary connecting link between primitive polygamy, subjecting all the wives equally before their owner, and monogamic marriage. But for the present I must pursue my summary inquiry through the lands of primitive polygamy.
In the whole of Polynesia polygamy was general and unlimited. There, again, the number of wives was strictly in proportion to rank and riches.[361] There were, however, examples of voluntary monogamy[362] among the chiefs, and a much larger number of monogamists, in spite of themselves, in the lower classes.[363] In several Polynesian islands polygamy was already evolving towards monogamy; thus, at Samoa,[364] at Tonga,[365] in New Zealand,[366] there existed a chief wife, exempted from hard work, and having pre-eminence over the other wives.
Over all the great American continent polygamy is or has been in force. The Ancas or Araucanos of South America—nomads and robbers—buy very dear wives when they can, and make concubines of all the prisoners procured in their razzias, exactly after the manner of the ancient Arabs. The poor or the feeble among them, as elsewhere, are badly provided, and are frequently reduced to remain celibate,[367] or to have only one wife. For the same reasons, the young men among the Otomacs were often obliged to be contented with an old woman,[368] and the Charruas waited till their first wife grew old before procuring a younger one.[369] Herrero tells us also, that in Honduras forced monogamy was general enough, except, indeed, for the chiefs, who appropriated the women by the right of the strongest.[370] In South America, as in Africa, the women were very far from rebelling against polygamy; for there, also, all the hard work fell to them, and the burden of it was lightened in proportion to the number of labourers. In the tribes that were already agricultural, the Guaranis, for example, the men did nothing to the land but clear off the brushwood and timber; then came the women, who did all the sowing, harvesting, prepared the fermented drink for guests,[371] without mentioning other domestic cares. Such a kind of life is necessarily unfavourable to delicacy, and even amongst civilised people habitual overwork is hardly compatible with refined sentiments. In all countries exclusive love and jealousy suppose not only some moral development, but also a certain amount of leisure and of time and capacity, to think. It is therefore quite natural that the savage woman should seldom pretend to possess a man for herself alone, and on this point the women of the Redskins of North America think and feel like the Guarani women of Brazil. Thus, with the Omahas, the man hardly ever takes a second wife but with the consent of the first.[372] Often the initiative even comes from her; she goes to find her husband, and says to him, “Marry the daughter of my brother. She and I are of the same flesh.” It must be admitted that America is the promised land of the matriarchate, or rather, of maternal filiation; polygamy easily takes an incestuous colour there; the wives of the same man are often relatives, habitually sisters. In about forty of the Redskin tribes, and surely they are not the only ones, when a man marries the eldest daughter of a family, he acquires, by express privilege, the right of taking afterwards for wives all the sisters of the first as soon as they become marriageable.[373] This was the custom of the Omahas, the Cheyennes, the Crees, the Osages, the Black-feet, the Crows, the Spokans of Columbia,[374] the Chawanons of Louisiana, etc.
The custom was not, however, obligatory. The wives were not necessarily relatives, or, at least, not necessarily sisters. Thus, with the Omahas, a man sometimes took as wives an aunt and a niece of his first wife.[375] Among the Californians a man sometimes married not only a group of sisters, but also their mother,[376] and in this respect the Greenlanders imitated their hereditary enemies, the Redskins.[377] But, consanguine or not, polygamy was general among the savage tribes of North America. The possession of a numerous flock of wives placed a man above the common as surely as that of a large fortune does in Europe;[378] religion even sanctified this polygamy, for in all countries it can accommodate itself to the dominant morals. Thus, the Chippeways believe that polygamy is agreeable to the Great Spirit; for it is a means of having a numerous posterity.[379]
Except the habitual consanguinity of the wives, the polygamy of the Redskins has nothing original in it; it is, as elsewhere, the privilege of the rich men.[380] Sometimes also the girls are retained from infancy, and then, as happens with the Noutka-Columbians, the buyer deposits certain valuable articles as security.[381] In these polygamous families of Redskins the harmony is rarely disturbed; and the man, always having the power to repudiate any wife as he may please, only has to command very submissive ones.[382] Here and there certain customs appear which have a shade of monogamy about them; for instance, among the Columbians every wife has her separate habitation, or, at the least, her special fireside.[383] Sometimes there is a chief wife having authority over the other wives.[384] But everywhere the subjection of women in regard to man is extreme. Among the Indians of New Mexico—and these are not by any means the most savage—the women have to prepare the food, tan the skins, cultivate the ground, fabricate the clothes, build the houses, and groom the horses. In return for this, the men, whose sole occupations are hunting and war, beat their wives without pity, and often mutilate and kill them.[385]
II. Polygamy in Asia and Europe.
We might already deduce some general ideas from our rapid survey of savage polygamy in Oceania, Africa, and America; but it will be convenient, before we do so, to interrogate the primitive races of Asia and Europe. Doubtless, the description of their conjugal manners and customs, after all that precedes, may seem monotonous; nevertheless, this monotony even is instructive; it proves that in all times and places, in despite of differences of race, climate and environment, the evolution of human groups is subject to certain laws, that the family, marriage, the constitution of property, and social organisation pass through a series of necessary phases; in short, that in attempting to construct a science of sociology we are not pursuing a chimera.
I resume, therefore, my enumeration. Among the indigenous tribes of India polygamy is widely spread, without, however, being universal; for each one of these small peoples has evolved, as it has been able, more or less rapidly. Some among them are polyandrous, and even monogamous. Often enough polyandry co-exists with polygamy, the one appearing as moral as the other.
With all these aborigines, marriage, or what we are pleased to call so, is generally concluded by purchase, and the price of the woman naturally oscillates according to the law of supply and demand. Most often it is represented by poultry, pigs, oxen, or cows, given to the parents. From this manner of procuring wives it seems that, there also, polygamy is the luxury of the rich or of chiefs. Among the Mishmis these privileged individuals sometimes possess sixty wives. The Mishmi husbands form a rare exception on one point—they are not at all exacting about the fidelity of their wives; they consider them as slaves or servants, and provided they continue to benefit their masters by their work, the latter willingly shut their eyes to their intrigues.[386]
Among these polygamous tribes, which it would take too long to enumerate, may be counted the Miris, the Dophlas, the Juangs, the Khamtis, the Singphos, etc.
We must again note in certain tribes, the Khamtis, for example, the monogamic pre-eminence of the first wife.[387] It is one of those sociological analogies of which I have already spoken, and it is important to point it out.
Polygamy still prevails with the mountaineers of Bootan, concurrently with polyandry. It is often incestuous; a man willingly marries two sisters, the one an adult, the other younger. But no other incest is recognised or punished except that committed between son and mother.[388]
Farther north, among the Ostiaks, a man feels no repugnance to marrying several sisters,[389] and, in general, polygamy is very widely spread among the nomad Mongols. A Yakout, for example, if obliged to make frequent journeys, takes care to have a wife in every place at which he stops.[390]
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.[391]
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 hypothetical Aryans with superhuman faculties. A French academician believed and declared that from the high plateaus of Pâmir they perceived the sea, distant, however, some hundreds of leagues; he affirms that they understood the “circles of the stars,” and were omniscient. It is to be presumed that this model race was of necessity monogamous, since it was perfect. To-day, however, we must demolish all these castles in the air, too lightly built in primitive and chimerical Arya. The antiquity of the Vedic hymns has had to be much shortened, and, if we consent to read them without prejudice, we shall have little admiration for the authors, those gross Aryans, who tried to make their gods drunk in order to obtain cows, and who sacrificed and cut to pieces animals, and perhaps men, on their altars. There is surely room to suppose that their social condition was not more refined than their religion. On this point the information that may be drawn from the Vedic hymns is vague and drowned in the waves of religious effusion. Nevertheless the Rig-Veda speaks of spouses of the gods, and of princes surrounded by their wives, etc. In fact, a document much more precise and more recent, the Code of Manu, abundantly proves that the Hindoos, like all other peoples, have begun by being polygamous.
I do not now insist on this point, as I shall return to it later. In every country the primitive races have practised polygamy, when that has been possible for them. Our European ancestors have not been more scrupulous on this point than our hypothetical Aryan cousins of Central Asia. Cæsar tells us that the Gauls were polygamous, and had the right of life and death over their wives.[392] Tacitus vaunts much the monogamy of the Germans; this moral feature, says he, distinguishes them from other barbarians, but he confesses that certain German chiefs had several wives, and that, as it happens in all barbarous countries, the wife was sold by the parents for presents consisting of oxen, horses, and arms.[393]
Polygamy was so natural to German morals that, long after Tacitus, the Merovingian kings, Clotaire and his sons, for example, still practised it, that Dagobert had three wives, and that Charlemagne himself was bigamous. We know, too, that Saint Columban was banished from Gaul only for having blamed the polygamy of King Thierry. Let us resign ourselves, therefore, to confess the truth. The white race has no divine investiture. Like all the others, it has sprung from animality; like all the others, it has been polygamous, and we have only to open our eyes to perceive that, in the present day, in countries reputed to be the most civilised, and even in the classes reputed to be the most distinguished, the majority of individuals have polygamic instincts which they find it difficult to resist.
We are now in a position to form a just opinion of primitive polygamy. Its causes are manifold. The principal one is often the disproportion of the sexes, resulting from the enormous mortality of men which savage life necessitates. The desire of giving the rein to a sensuality that there is, as yet, no thought of repressing, may have a certain share in the matter; but this motive, which is perhaps dominant in the polygamous anthropoid apes, quickly becomes secondary in man.
Even the lowest savage is more calculating, and has more forethought, than the monkey. His first slave, one may say his first domestic animal, is his wife. Even when he is still a simple hunter and nomad, he has always game to be carried, fire to be lighted, a shelter to be erected, without reckoning that wives are very apt at gathering edible fruits and shell-fish, and rendering a thousand services. Besides, they give birth to offspring that can be bartered, sold, or even eaten at need.
It is, therefore, very desirable to possess as many as possible of these beings, fitted for such various ends. If a man is an agriculturist, the wife is then of still greater utility; he puts upon her all the hard work; she digs, plants, sows, reaps even, and all for the profit of her master. She is, besides, a subjected and feeble creature, whom he can treat just as he will, and on whom he can let loose his instincts of brutal domination. By force or by ruse, by capture or by purchase, he therefore procures himself as many wives as possible. He often buys them in the lump; for example, a lot of sisters, or of relations of different ages. This diversity of age has its value; for, in all the numerous uses to which a wife can be put, the younger ones can take at need the place of the elder when the latter are worn out or broken down.
Polygamy begins with equality—that is to say, that the man subjects his little feminine flock to an equal servitude, against which the wives do not think of rebelling, as they find it quite natural, for they are not of a more refined nature than their proprietor. By degrees, however, a certain hierarchy is established among the wives of the same man. This comes to pass when the social structure is already more complex, when there are chiefs, nobles, and priests. Polygamy, in this case, is restrained. Though it continues to be the taste of nearly all men, it becomes the privilege of the rich and powerful. The latter sometimes even indulge in an excessive polygamy, and it becomes difficult for them to maintain order and servile submission among their feminine flock. From this time they have one or more titular wives, who rule over their companions, and are sometimes exempt from hard labour. These chief wives are often daughters, sisters, or relatives of noted warriors, or of important men, with whom the husband is allied, and whose prestige somewhat protects the wives that they have given, or more often sold. In consequence of this, a certain tendency to become a distinct personality awakens in the wives themselves; they insist on having their separate hearth, and even their distinct apartment; life in the flock weighs on them.
Polygamy then puts on monogamic tendencies. The greater number of superior races have adopted this hierarchical polygamy before reaching the legal monogamy, in a mitigated form, of which I shall treat later. It is important now to describe with some details this polygamy of superior races.