Among the Sinhalese there are hardly any old bachelors and old maids;[763] and Mr. Marshall says of the Todas, “No unmarried class exists, to disturb society with its loves and broils; ... it is a ‘very much married’ people. Every man and every woman, every lad and every girl is somebody’s husband or wife; tied at the earliest possible age.... With the exception of a cripple girl, and of those women who, past the child-bearing age, were widows, I did not meet with a single instance of unmarried adult females.”[764] Among the Toungtha, it is unheard of for a man or woman to be unmarried after the age of thirty, and among the Chukmas, a bachelor twenty-five years old is rarely seen.[765] The Muásís consider it a father’s duty to fix upon a bridegroom as soon as his daughter becomes marriageable.[766] Among the Burmese[767] and the Hill Dyaks of Borneo,[768] old maids and old bachelors are alike unknown. Among the Sumatrans, too, instances of persons of either sex passing their lives in a state of celibacy are extremely rare:—“In the districts under my charge,” says Marsden, “are about eight thousand inhabitants, among whom I do not conceive it would be possible to find ten instances of men of the age of thirty years unmarried.”[769] In Java, Mr. Crawfurd “never saw a woman of two-and-twenty that was not, or had not been, married.”[770] In Tonga, according to Mariner, there were but few women who, from whim or some accidental cause, remained single for life.[771] In Australia, “nearly all the girls are betrothed at a very early age;” and Mr. Curr never heard of a woman, over sixteen years of age, who, prior to the breakdown of aboriginal customs after the coming of the Whites, had not a husband.[772] As to the natives of Herbert River, Northern Queensland, Herr Lumholtz says that though the majority of the young men have to wait a long time before they get wives, it is rare for a man to die unmarried.[773] Indeed, so indispensable does marriage seem to uncivilized man, that a person who does not marry is looked upon almost as an unnatural being, or, at any rate, is disdained.[774] Among the Santals, if a man remains single, “he is at once despised by both sexes, and is classed next to a thief, or a witch: they term the unhappy wretch ‘No man.’”[775] Among the Kafirs, a bachelor has no voice in the kraal.[776] The Tipperahs, as we are told by Mr. J. F. Browne, do not consider a man a person of any importance till he is married;[777] and, in the Tupi tribes, no man was suffered to partake of the drinking-feast while he remained single.[778] The Fijians even believed that he who died wifeless was stopped by the god Nangganangga on the road to Paradise, and smashed to atoms.[779]