With the exception of the rare and singular forms of sexual or conjugal association which we have just passed in review, matrimonial types are not numerous among the peoples more or less civilised who have already instituted a marriage--that is to say, a sexual association regulated by generally admitted convention. The forms of marriage most universally practised, those which the majority of mankind has reached and stopped at, are polygamy and monogamy, or monandry. I shall have much to say of these. For the moment I shall treat of another kind of marriage, far less widely spread without doubt, but which, however, exists or has existed at divers points of the globe; I allude to polyandry. I have no longer to prove that morality is variable and perfectible, that it results from social life, and is only to be taken together with the other needs, desires, and necessities of the struggle for existence. Our moral sentiments are simply habits incarnate in our brain, or instincts artificially created; and thus an act reputed culpable at Paris or at London may be and frequently is held innocent at Calcutta or at Pekin. In order to judge impartially of polyandric marriage we must remember these elementary truths. Not, certainly, that polyandry is rare amongst us, but it is censured, counted as criminal, and obliged to hide itself. The legal and regulated possession, publicly acknowledged, of one woman by several men, who are all husbands by the same title, shocks our feelings and morality extremely in the present day.