With all these aborigines, marriage, or what we are pleased to call so, is generally concluded by purchase, and the price of the woman naturally oscillates according to the law of supply and demand. Most often it is represented by poultry, pigs, oxen, or cows, given to the parents. From this manner of procuring wives it seems that, there also, polygamy is the luxury of the rich or of chiefs. Among the Mishmis these privileged individuals sometimes possess sixty wives. The Mishmi husbands form a rare exception on one point--they are not at all exacting about the fidelity of their wives; they consider them as slaves or servants, and provided they continue to benefit their masters by their work, the latter willingly shut their eyes to their intrigues.[386] Among these polygamous tribes, which it would take too long to enumerate, may be counted the Miris, the Dophlas, the Juangs, the Khamtis, the Singphos, etc. We must again note in certain tribes, the Khamtis, for example, the monogamic pre-eminence of the first wife.[387] It is one of those sociological analogies of which I have already spoken, and it is important to point it out. Polygamy still prevails with the mountaineers of Bootan, concurrently with polyandry. It is often incestuous; a man willingly marries two sisters, the one an adult, the other younger. But no other incest is recognised or punished except that committed between son and mother.[388] Farther north, among the Ostiaks, a man feels no repugnance to marrying several sisters,[389] and, in general, polygamy is very widely spread among the nomad Mongols. A Yakout, for example, if obliged to make frequent journeys, takes care to have a wife in every place at which he stops.[390] The polygamic _régime_ is also in great honour in the Mongolian archipelagoes of Asia, in the Palos Islands, in the Caroline Islands, etc. Among the Battas of Sumatra it evidently begins to be distasteful to the women, since the polygamous husband is obliged to assign to each of his wives a special hearth, and kitchen utensils of her own, with which she prepares her food apart, or with that of her husband, when she is on duty, and required by the master.[391] In this chapter I confine myself to primitive polygamy, to that of the grossest savages or barbarians; but there are barbarians of every race and colour, and the roots of all superior civilisations necessarily go far down into primitive savagery. Now we have seen that the polygamic _régime_ is prevalent throughout the world among races that are little cultivated; we may hence conclude that the most civilised nations must have begun with polygamy, and, in reality, it has been thus everywhere and always. In the various civilised societies, living or dead, marriage has commenced by being polygamous. It is a law which has few exceptions.