In not a few communities of Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, Africa, and America polyandry prevailed; that is, the woman was expected to bestow her caresses in turn on two or more men, to the destruction of the desire for exclusive possession which is an imperative trait of love.  Rowney describes (154) what we might call syndicate marriage which has prevailed among the Meeris of India: 

“All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the best-looking girl varying from twenty to thirty pigs, and, if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take partners to make up the number.”

According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britons for brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wives in common, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among the ancient Germans; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition of the women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that those who succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters.  When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, they found the women married to several husbands, who lived with 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