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 the south.  The same practice occurs among the Coorgs of the Western Ghats, among the Nairs at the coastal piedmont of this range, among the Todas of the mountain stronghold known as the Nilgiri Hills (peaks 8000 feet or 2630 meters), and it crops out sporadically among certain mountain Bantu tribes of South Africa.[1351]

[Sidenote:  Female infanticide.]

There seems little doubt that polyandry, as Herbert Spencer maintains, has been adopted as an obvious and easy check upon increase of population in rugged countries.[1352] It is generally coupled with other preventive checks.  In the Nilgiri Hills, as we found also to be the case on many Polynesian islands, it is closely associated with female infanticide.[1353] The Todas in 1867 showed a proportion of two men to one woman, but later, with the decline of infanticide under British rule, a proportion of 100 men to 75 women, and a resulting modification of the institution of polyandry.[1354] It may well be that the paucity