es, naturally recommended itself to a country where
asceticism was obviously expedient. The world shows nowhere else so
large a celibate class. In Tibet, monks are estimated at 175,000 to
500,000 in a total population of three millions. Archibald Little
estimates their number at one-third of the total male population.[1344]
Derge, which is the most productive district both agriculturally and
industrially of eastern Tibet and is also most densely inhabited, counts
at least 10,000 lamas in a total population of about 42,000.[1345] Not
less than one-sixth of the inhabitants of Ladak are in religious houses
as monks and nuns.[1346] Families in Tibet are small, yet each devotes one
or more children to convent or monastic life.[1347] In western Tibet,
especially about Taklakot in the Himalayan border, one boy in every
family is invariably devoted to the priesthood, and one or more
daughters must become nuns. But the nun generally resides with her
family or lives in some monastery--with unspeakable results.[1348]

[Sidenote: Polyandry.]

The Tibetans seem to be enthusiastic Malthusians, with all the courage
of their convictions. Religious celibacy among them is only an adjunct
to another equally effective social device for restricting population.
This is the institution of polyandry, which crops out in widely
distributed mountain regions of limited resources, just as it appears
not infrequently in primitive island societies. Its sporadic occurrence
in extensive lowlands, as among the Warraus of Guiana and certain tribes
of the Orinoco, is extremely rare, as also its occasional appearance
among pastoral steppe-dwellers, like the Hottentots and Damaras.[1349] It
is often associated with polygamy where wealth exists, and is never the
exclusive form of marriage, yet its frequency among mountain peoples is
striking. Strabo describes fraternal polyandry as it existed in
mountainous Yemen. There among a Semitic people, as to-day in Mongolian
Tibet and among the aboriginal Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in peninsular
India, the staff of one husband left at the door of the house excluded
the others.[1350] In modern times the institution is found throughout
Tibet, and in the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan districts adjoining it, as
in Ladak, Kunawar, Kumaon, Garhwal, Spiti, Sirmur, among the Miris,
Daphlas, Abors and Bhutias occupying the southern slope of the
Himalayans eastward from Sikkim, and the Murmese tribes of the Khasia
Hills just to