Note 1352 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

There seems little doubt that polyandry, as Herbert Spencer maintains, has been adopted as an obvious and easy check upon increase of population in rugged countries.1352 It is generally coupled with other preventive checks. In the Nilgiri Hills, as we found also to be the case on many Polynesian islands, it is closely associated with female infanticide.1353 The Todas in 1867 showed a proportion of two men to one woman, but later, with the decline of infanticide under British rule, a proportion of 100 men to 75 women, and a resulting modification of the institution of polyandry.1354 It may well be that the paucity of women suggested this form of marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent. The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,1355 and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small number of the tribe.