We learn from Herodotus that among the Sauromatæ, a people in the northern parts of Europe and Asia, the women dressed in the habits of men, and, like them, engaged in battle; that none were allowed to marry till she shall first have killed her man. Hence it happened, we are further told, that many died old maids, never having been able to fulfil the conditions. How any population could be kept up under the existence of such a law, no one now can question the historian. I suppose, from the necessity of the case, that a reform was demanded, and more peaceful marriages were the first-fruits of a free trade. It must have been an adventurous thing for a man to marry a woman who had once killed her man to obtain one husband; he might have lived in continual fear that she might kill a second man to have another husband. It appears that marriage, though it is nominally free, is under restriction; were it otherwise, the increase of population would be far greater. “In ordinary times a large proportion of the marriageable women of every country are unmarried.” The writer might have spared his ink; but he adds: “And the most direct action on the population is produced by their entering the marriage state.” As one example may serve a general purpose, the Census gives that of the south-eastern division, comprising Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, and Berks, in which “the number of women of the age of 20, and under 45, amounted at the last Census to 290,209, of whom 169,806 were wives, and 120,403 were spinsters or widows. 49,997 births were registered in the same counties during the year 1850, or 10 children were born in 1850 to every 58 women living in 1851.” It is to be presumed that among matrimonial chances every lot is a prize. The difficulty of a choice, where multitudes assemble, maintains a law of hesitation—of indecision—by which it happens that celibacy becomes wise, and is fond of repeating the philosopher’s advice as to the time to marry: if young, not yet; if middle-aged, wait; if old, never. Let us see how the reverse operates where the choice is very limited. St Kilda, in the parish of Harris, is 70 miles away from the mainland in the Western Hebrides; the population is 110—48 males, 62 females; 32 families in 32 houses. “There are 19 married couples on the island, 2 widowers, 8 widows. _Five unmarried men, 5 unmarried women of the age of 20, and under 46._” One would imagine these had only to meet and to marry. Five is no great choice; the greater haste, you would suppose, to take a partner. Is the solution to be found in this extraordinary fact, that there is no clergyman to unite the couples resident on the island? The five couples must wait; and as the clergyman on the mainland may hesitate to go 140 miles to marry one couple, he is probably waiting for all five to come to a decision. It must have been some such unfortunate place as St Kilda which supplied the wit to the epigrammatist upon the question of marriages ceasing elsewhere, the