Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/597



ERHAPS there is no civilized institution to which man has accommodated himself with so ill a grace as monogamy. Hardly a perversion of it has ever existed but may still be found. Polygamy is widely spread in the most advanced communities; temporary polyandrous ménages à trois are known to exist elsewhere than among the Nairs and Tibetans and ancient Britons; the matriarchate in one shape or another may be detected well outside the sixty peoples among whom Mr. Tylor has discovered it; and marriage by free choice is far from having superseded marriage by capture or by purchase. It is the less surprising that abnormal or ancient forms of the union should have been revived in colonies. In this relationship, as in most others, the colonist, like the sperm cell after its junction with the germ cell, sinks at once to a lower level, and the race has to begin life over again. The fall is inevitable. The earliest immigrants are all of them men. Everywhere finding indigenes in the newly settled country, they can usually count on the complaisance or the submissiveness of the tribesmen. Native women have a strange fascination for civilized men, even for those who have been intimate with the European aristocracies and have belonged to them. Adventurous Castins might find their account in a relationship that was in perfect keeping with the wild life they led. It is more strange that, enslaved by an appetite which sometimes rose to a collective if seldom to a personal passion, educated men, with a scientific or a public career flung open to them at their option, able men who have written the best books about the races they knew only too well, men