Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/391

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in Arabia Felix, where every sort of provision is exceedingly cheap, where the fruits of the ground, the general food for man, are produced spontaneously, the supporting of a number of wives costs no more than so many slaves or servants; their food is the same, and a blue cotton shirt, a habit common to them all, is not more chargeable for the one than the other. The consequence is, that celibacy in women is prevented, and the number of people is increased in a fourfold ratio by polygamy, to what it is in those that are monogamous.

there are authors fond of system, enemies to free inquiry, and blinded by prejudice, who contend that polygamy, without distinction of circumstances, is detrimental to the population of a country. The learned Dr Arbuthnot, in a paper addressed to the Royal Society*, has maintained this strange doctrine, in a still stranger manner. He lays it down, as his first position, that in femine masculino of our first parent Adam, there was impressed an original necessity of procreating, ever after, an equal number of males and females. The manner he proves this, has received great incense from the vulgar, as containing un unanswerable argument. He shews, by the casting of three dice, that the chances are almost infinite, that an equal number of males and females should not be born in any year; and he pretends to prove, that every year in twenty, as taken from the bills of mortality, the same number of males and females have constantly been produced, or at least a greater proportion of men than of women, to make up for the ha- VOL. I.


 * Philosoph. Transact. Vol. 27. p. 186.