In ancient Peru, the Incas decreed monogamy to be obligatory for the lower classes. The Chinese attribute to Fo-Hi, their first sovereign, the institution of marriage. This legendary king is said to have raised them out of promiscuity. Such also was the _rôle_ of Cecrops, in Greece, and the same thing happened in primitive India. About thirty years ago a number of erudite Europeans, especially the mythologists and linguists, were smitten with a blind love for the Indian hymns of the Rig-Veda. They set to work to torture these old Sanscrit texts, naturally obscure, and by subjecting them to a sort of linguistic examination, they wrung from them imaginary revelations. It was decided that a unique and marvellous race, primitively endowed with every virtue and capacity, had sprung up one fine day on some plateau or other of Central Asia. The most enthusiastic of them generously endowed these hypothetical Aryans with superhuman faculties. A French academician believed and declared that from the high plateaus of Pâmir they perceived the sea, distant, however, some hundreds of leagues; he affirms that they understood the “circles of the stars,” and were omniscient. It is to be presumed that this model race was of necessity monogamous, since it was perfect. To-day, however, we must demolish all these castles in the air, too lightly built in primitive and chimerical Arya. The antiquity of the Vedic hymns has had to be much shortened, and, if we consent to read them without prejudice, we shall have little admiration for the authors, those gross Aryans, who tried to make their gods drunk in order to obtain cows, and who sacrificed and cut to pieces animals, and perhaps men, on their altars. There is surely room to suppose that their social condition was not more refined than their religion. On this point the information that may be drawn from the Vedic hymns is vague and drowned in the waves of religious effusion. Nevertheless the Rig-Veda speaks of spouses of the gods, and of princes surrounded by their wives, etc. In fact, a document much more precise and more recent, the Code of Manu, abundantly proves that the Hindoos, like all other peoples, have begun by being polygamous. I do not now insist on this point, as I shall return to it later. In every country the primitive races have practised polygamy, when that has been possible for them. Our European ancestors have not been more scrupulous on this point than our hypothetical Aryan cousins of Central Asia. Cæsar tells us that the Gauls were polygamous, and had the right of life and death over their wives.[392] Tacitus vaunts much the monogamy of the Germans; this moral feature, says he, distinguishes them from other barbarians, but he confesses that certain German chiefs had several wives, and that, as it happens in all barbarous countries, the wife was sold by the parents for presents consisting of oxen, horses, and arms.[393]