ith their
common spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to Samuel
Turner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of a
family must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The Nair woman in
India may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom she
lives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldest
brother marries, he generally shares his wife with his younger
brothers.

WIVES AND GIRLS IN COMMON

Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schuermann says (223) that the
brothers practically have their wives in common.

"A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these singular
connections; a woman honors the brothers of the man to
whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of
husbands; but the men make a distinction, calling their
own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they
have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood,
kartetis."

R.H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who had
twenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote a
valuable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminous
remarks:

"All women who may become wives in marriage, and are
not yet appropriated, are to a certain extent looked
upon by those who may be their husbands as open to a
more or less legitimate intercourse. In fact,
appropriation of particular women to their own
husbands, though established by every sanction of
native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in
native society, nor in all probability anything like so
deep a foundation in the history of the native people,
as the severance of either sex by divisions which most
strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to
those of the section or sections to which they
themselves do not belong. Two proofs or
exemplifications of this are conspicuous. (1) There is
probably no place in which the common opinion of
Melanesians approves the intercourse of the unmarried
youths and girls as a thing good in itself, though it
allows it as a thing to be expected and excused; but
intercourse within the limit which restrains from
marriage, where two members of the same division are
concerned, is a crime, is incest.... (2) The feeling,
on the other hand, that the intercourse of the sexes
was natural where the man and woman bel