In Timor, an island in the Indian Ocean, it is said, that parents sell their children in order to purchase more wives. In Circassia, women are reared and improved in beauty and every alluring art, only for the purpose of being sold. The prince of the Circassians demanded of the prince of Mingrelia an hundred slaves loaded with tapestry, an hundred cows, as many oxen, and the same number of horses, as the price of his sister. In New-Zealand, we meet with a custom which may be called purchasing a wife for a night, and which is proof that those must also be purchased who are intended for a longer duration; and what to us is a little supprising, this temporary wife, insisted upon being treated with as much deference and respect, as if she had been married for life; but in general, this is not the case in other countries, for the wife who is purchased, is always trained up in the principles of slavery; and, being inured to every indignity and mortification from her parents, she expects no better treatment from her husband. There is little difference in the condition of her who is put to sale by her sordid parents, and her who is disposed of in the same manner by the magistrates, as a part of the state's property. Besides those we have already mentioned in this work, the Thracians put the fairest of their virgins up to public sale, and the magistrates of Crete had the sole power of choosing partners in marriage for their young men; and, in the execution of this power, the affection and interest of the parties was totally overlooked, and the good of the state the only object of attention; in pursuing which, they always allotted the strongest and best made of the sex to one another, that they might raise up a generation of warriors, or of women fit to be the mothers of warriors. POLYGAMY AND CONCUBINAGE. Polygamy and concubinage having in process of time become fashionable vices, the number of women kept by the great became at last more an article of grandeur and state, than a mode of satisfying the animal appetite: Solomon had threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number. Maimon tells us, that among the Jews a man might have as many wives as he pleased, even to the number of a hundred, and that it was not in their power to prevent him, provided he could maintain, and pay them all the conjugal debt once a week; but in this duty he was not to run in arrear to any of them above a month, though with regard to concubines he might do as he pleased.