If, however, the custom of the younger brother marrying the widow of the elder was of primitive institution (compare Genesis xxxviii. and the Code of Menu), the corruption of this custom into polyandry, in circumstances which may at any time have disturbed the balance of the sexes in the overcrowded East, though it revolts will not absolutely astonish us; whereas the converse, _i.e._ restriction to successive appropriation contingent upon widowhood, from a state of virtual promiscuity, is so uphill a reform and so contrary to probability that it requires some internal evidence of the stages, and some warrant in modern observation to make it plausible. None are given. For the fact that we find both the "rude" and the "regulated" form existing side by side cuts both ways;[45] and the discovery of a form of capture--the Rakshasa, among the eight forms sanctioned by the code of Menu, enforces our argument--it would exactly correspond to the military exemption among the Jews (Mr M'Lennan, p. 82), supposing we were able to read Deuteronomy xx. 10-14 in the same sense as Mr M'Lennan. In that case, therefore, it would be a departure from or relaxation of a rule laid down--a view which is confirmed when we find that the authority quoted (Dr Muir, "Sanscrit Texts," the Ramayana) tells that "Ravana, the most terrible of all the Rakshasas, is stigmatised as a _destroyer of religious duties_, and ravisher of the _wives_ of others" (Prim. Mar. p. 309), which testifies to degeneracy at some period; whereas if Mr M'Lennan's view is true, this hero must be relegated to a time when the conception of "religious duties," and even of other men's "wives" were unknown. [45] It seems to me that Turner's account of polyandry in Tibet, quoted by Mr M'Lennan, p. 193, gives plain evidence of the transition from the Jewish custom to the "regulated" polyandry. It is said "that _the choice_ of a _wife_ is the _privilege_ of the _elder brother_." We have seen (_supra_, 46), that when mankind had got, we know not how, into tribal exogamous groups, "kinship through females would have a tendency," and a moment's consideration will show an immediate tendency, "to render the exogamous groups heterogeneous, and thus to supersede the system of capturing wives." We ask why did they capture wives? Mr M'Lennan implies that their ideas of _incest_ forbade marriage within the tribe.[46] Apparently, then, the groups must have been exogamous[47] previously to the time when they had attained to the knowledge of "kinship through females," else "kinship through females" would from the first have operated to produce a state of things which would have rendered exogamy unnecessary and inexplicable. The corollary is curious; they must, therefore, have had the idea of incest before they had the idea of kinship through females!