of women suggested this form of marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent.  The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,[1355] and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small number of the tribe.

Throughout Tibet and Ladak polyandry works hand in hand with the lamaseries in limiting population.  The conspicuous fact in Tibetan polyandry is its restriction to the agricultural portion of the population.  The pastoral nomads of the country, depending on their yaks, sheep and goats, wandering at will over a very wide, if desolate territory, practice monogamy and polygamy.[1356] The sedentary population, on the other hand, is restricted to tillable lands so small that each farm produces only enough for one family.  Subdivision under a divided inheritance would be disastrous to these dwarf estates, especially owing to possible complications growing out of irrigating rights.[1357] Polyandry leaves the estate and the family undivided, and by permitting only one wife to several fraternal husbands restricts the number of children.  It does this also in another way by diminishing the fertility of the mothers; for all travelers comment upon the paucity of children in polyandrous families.

Westermarck lays stress upon the fact that polyandry prevails chiefly in sterile countries.  He regards it less as a conscious device to check increase of population than a result of the disproportion of males to females in polyandrous communities.  The preponderance of male births he attributes to the excessive endogamy bordering on inbreeding which tends to prevail in all isolated mountain valleys; and also, as a possibility, to the undernourished condition of the parents caused by scanty food supplies, which Duesing found to be productive of a high percentage of male births in proportion to female.[1358] The motive of restricting population seems entitled to more weight than Westermarck concedes to it; for he slurs over the fact that in Tibet polyandry gives rise to a large number of superfluous women who fill the nunneries,[1359] while in the Nilgiri Hills redundant females were eliminated by infanticide.  The fact seems to be that in the institution of polyandry we have a social and psychological effect of environment, reinforced by a physiological effect.

[Sidenote:  Effects of polyandry and polygamy.]