petu (in 1898) numbered 35 men, 46 women, 38 boys, and
27 girls; the Aivilik 26 men, 34 women, 27 boys, 15 girls.
West of Hudson Bay Captain Comer in 1902 found 119
men, 123 women, 138 boys, and 66 girls among the Netchil-
lik; and 46 men, 58 women, 41 boys, 33 girls among the
Samniktumiut. That is to say, in none of these instances
save Holm's first-mentioned settlement is even bigamy pos-
sible as a universal institution. Indeed, in Cranz's day
hardly one Greenlander in twenty had two wives, Captain
Holm never found a man with three, and even an unusually
influential Aivilik contented himself with two. In short,
even among the Eskimo, who constitute an a fortiori case,
monogamy is the rule in practice, though polygyny is per-
mitted; and marriage with more than two women is un-
doubtedly exceptional.

It is true that from Africa there are reported instances
of an extraordinary multiplicity of wives. Even disre-
garding such anomalies as the Dahomi court, where all
the Amazons are by a fiction considered wives of the king,
we find well-authenticated cases of men with five, ten,
twenty and even sixty wives, and these at least so far as
the first-mentioned figure is concerned are described as
fairly common. Unfortunately none of the authorities I
have seen on the subject deigns to furnish us with data as
to the relative numbers of the sexes. From remarks inci-
dentally dropped by them it seems certain that only the
wealthy and the eminent men have polygynous households.
Thus, among the Kikuyu of East Africa Mr. and Mrs.
Routledge found monogamy "quite usual"; two or three
wives were common; and the rich had six or seven. It is
clear that even so moderate an indulgence in polygyny on
the part of the socially distinguished would make it very
difficult for many young men to acquire a mate at all. But
the consequent hardship is mitigated by two conditions.
In the first place, there is the chance of inheriting a wife
through the levirate or one of the other orthodox methods.

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