damages. Where the husband acts adjutor or cavaliere to his
friend's "Omantwe"--female person or wife--and the friend is
equally complaisant, wedlock may hardly be called permanent, and
there can be no tie save children. The old immorality endures; it
is as if the command were reversed by accepting that misprint
which so scandalized the Star Chamber, "Thou shalt commit
adultery." Yet, unpermitted, the offence is one against property,
and Moechus may be cast in damages ranging from $100 to $200:
what is known in low civilization as the "panel dodge" is an
infamy familiar to almost all the maritime tribes of Africa. He
must indeed be a Solomon of a son who, sur les bords du Gabon,
can guess at his own sire; a question so impertinent is never put
by the ex-officio father. The son succeeds by inheritance to his
father's relict, who, being generally in years, is condemned to
be useful when she has ceased to be an ornament, and, if there
are several, they are equally divided amongst the heirs.

Trading tribes rarely affect the pundonor which characterizes the
pastoral and the predatory; these people traffic in all things,
even in the chastity of their women. What with pre-nuptial
excesses, with early unions, often infructuous, with a virtual
system of community, and with universal drunkenness, it is not to
be wondered at if the maritime tribes of Africa degenerate and
die out. Such apparently is the modus operandi by which Nature
rids herself of the effete races which have served to clear the
ground and to pave the way for higher successors. Wealth and
luxury, so generally inveighed against by poets and divines,
injure humanity only when they injuriously affect reproduction;
and poverty is praised only because it breeds more men. The true
tests of the physical prosperity of a race, and of its position