hr.[995]

In England the exodus took the form of trading expeditions and the
foundation of commercial colonies long before the food resources of the
island had been even considerably developed. The accessible sea offered
lines of least resistance, while the monopoly of the land by a
privileged aristocracy and the fiercely defended corn laws made the
limitations of a small area more oppressive. In Ireland, a landless
peasantry in a grainless land, dulled by deprivation of opportunity,
found in emigration an escape from insupportable evils.

[Sidenote: Artificial checks to population.]

While emigration draws off the surplus population, there tend to develop
in islands, as also in barren highlands where population early reaches
the point of saturation, various devices to restrict natural increase.
The evils of congestion are foreseen and guarded against. Abbe Raynal,
writing of islanders in general, remarked as far back as 1795, "It is
among these people that we trace the origin of that multitude of
singular institutions which retards the progress of population.
Anthropophagy, the castration of males, the infibulation of females,
late marriages, the consecration of virginity, the approbation of
celibacy, the punishments exercised against girls who become mothers at
too early an age," he enumerates as such checks. Malthus, in his Essay
on Population, commenting on this statement, notes that the bounds to
the number of inhabitants on islands, especially small ones, are so
narrow and so obvious that no one can ignore them.[996]

The checks to population practiced on islands are either preventive or
positive. The extreme measure to restrict marriage is found among the
wretched Budumas who inhabit the small, marshy islands of Lake Chad.
Tribal custom allows only the chiefs and headmen to have wives. A brass
crescent inserted in the ear of a boy indicates the favored one among a
chief's sons destined to carry on his race. For his brothers this is
made physically impossible; they become big, dull, timid creatures
contributing by their fishing to the support of the thinly populated
villages. The natives of the Shari River delta on the southern shore of
Lake Chad use Buduma as a term of contempt for a man.[997]

[Sidenote: Polyandry.]

In islands, as in unproductive highlands where hunger stalks abroad,
marriage readily takes the form of polyandry. On the Canary Islands, at
the time of their conquest in 1402, polyandry exist