In Brahmanic India the daughter is also bought from the parents. A curious verse of the Code of Manu tells us how the purchaser was indemnified in the case of substitution of another person: “If, after having shown a suitor a young girl, whose hand is granted to him, another is given him to wife, and secretly brought to him, he becomes the husband of both for the same price; such is the decision of Manu.”[329] Things have not much changed at present. “When they wish to signify that they are going to be married,” says an editor of _Lettres édifiantes_, in speaking of the Hindoos, “they generally say that they are going to buy a wife.” However, the parents do not appropriate the entire sum paid by the purchaser; a great part of it goes to buy jewels for the bride.[330] The ancient Malays of Sumatra had solved the conjugal problem in three different ways. Sometimes the man bought and led away the woman, according to the universal custom; sometimes the woman bought the man, who then came to live with her family; sometimes the two were married on a footing of equality.[331] We must note in passing that this last matrimonial form is very exceptional. Throughout Europe, as well in Greco-Latin antiquity as among barbarians, the young girl has formerly been considered as a negotiable property, and marriage as a sale. The Sagas tell us that the Scandinavian fathers married their daughters without consulting them--after the manner of savages--and received an indemnity from the son-in-law.[332] With the Germans the daughter could not marry without the authorisation of her father or of her nearest relative, who first received the earnest money from the bridegroom;[333] as for the bride, she received the _oscle_, or price of the first kiss, and then the _morgengabe_, which constituted her dowry. In return, the German widow, like the Afghan widow, was the property of the parents of her husband, and could not re-marry without their authorisation.[334] In primitive Greece the daughter was purchased either by presents to the father or by services rendered to him.[335] The father could marry his daughter as he thought well, and in default of a son could leave her by will, with the heritage of which she formed a part, to a stranger.[336] At Rome also the daughter was the property of her father, and until the time of Antoninus the father had the right to re-marry her when the husband had been absent three years.[337] Marriage by purchase had certainly been the primitive form of the conjugal contract. In reality the _confarreatio_, a solemn and religious union in the presence of ten witnesses, was a patrician marriage. The _usus_, or the consecration of a free union after a year of cohabitation, strongly resembles the Polynesian marriage. But the most common conjugal form, the one which succeeded the _usus_, and surely preceded the _confarreatio_, was marriage by purchase, the _coemptio_.