The marriage of Hindus is complete without consummation; and as girls are almost invariably married before the age of puberty, and sometimes long before, consummation is generally deferred, it may be, for several years. But all this time the parties are husband and wife, and if the husband dies the child becomes a widow. The condition of these child widows in India is certainly not an enviable one, for practically they can never hope to marry again. Whether the second marriage would be lawful was a disputed point in Hindu law until an act of the Indian Legislature (Act XV. of 1860) declared in favour of the opinion that the widow might remarry. But the social prejudice against remarriage is still very strong, and such a marriage rarely takes place. If the widow has inherited any property from her husband, she loses it by contracting a second marriage. There is no legal restraint upon the number of wives that a Hindu may marry, but polygamy is not practised so largely as is sometimes supposed. Members of the three higher castes are forbidden to marry a woman of the same _gotra_ as themselves. Literally a gotra means a cattle-yard, and the prohibition is considered to exclude marriage between all those who are descended from the same male ancestor through an uninterrupted line of males. This rule is said not to apply to Sudras. But there is another rule which applies to all Hindus, and prohibits the marriage of a man with a girl descended from his paternal or maternal ancestors within the sixth degree. The working out of the rule is a little peculiar, but the result is to give a rather wide rule of exclusion of both agnates and cognates. There is, however, this important exception to these rules of exclusion--that if a fit match cannot otherwise be procured, a man may marry a girl within the fifth degree on the father's side and the third on the mother's. Practically this reduces the limit of exclusion to that last stated, because no one but the parties themselves with whom the choice rested could say whether or no any other suitable wife was available to the husband.