Page:Malabari, Behramji M. - Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882).djvu/243

Rh for man or beast, asked the doctor very plaintively how it was that his grandchildren were so very diminutive and often deformed. The doctor replied, "My dear sir,if you keep up the practice of marrying cousins, I will not be surprised if, ten years hence, you get babies no better than half-formed ourang-outangs!"

And no mistake.

Too much of cousin-marriage has given us not a few ourang-outangs in physique as well as in intellect.

The Parsi is a monogamist; not so the Hindu and the Mahomedan. Polygamy obtains amongst the very highest circles or the very lowest.

A friend of mine has a Dhobi (a washerman), a low class Hindu, who has six wives. Being asked one day what a poor man like him could do with so many costly luxuries, the man explained, with a wicked leer, that he had originally married only one wife, of his own caste, that she was his queen-wife, and she attended to his personal wants. The second wife, he explained, he had married for mere convenience, and so also the other four. The first looked after his kitchen, the second and third earned money for the whole family, the fourth was intended for perpetuation of his race; she having failed, the fifth was taken