ng
young girls to it years before they have reached the age of puberty.
Some details will be found in the chapters on Australia, Africa, and
India. Here it may be noted--to indicate the wide prevalence of a
custom which it would be unjust to animals to call bestial, because
beasts never sink so low--that Borneans, as Schwaner notes, marry off
girls from three to five; that in Egypt child-wives of seven or eight
can be seen; that Javanese girls may be married at seven; that North
American Indians often took brides of ten or eleven, while in Southern
Australia girls were appropriated as early as seven. Hottentot girls
were not spared after the age of seven, nor were Bushman girls, though
they did not become mothers till ten or twelve years old; while Kaffir
girls married at eight, Somals at six to eight. The cause of these
early marriages is not climatic, as some fancy, but simply, as
Roberton has pointed out, the coarseness of the men. The list might be
extended indefinitely. In Old Calabar sometimes, we read in Ploss,

"a man who has already several wives may be seen with an
infant of two or three weeks on his lap, caressing and
kissing it as his wife. Wives of four to six years we found
occasionally (in China, Guzuate, Ceylon, and Brazil); from
seven to nine years on they are no longer rare, and the
years from ten to twelve are a widely prevalent marriage
age."

The amorous savage betrays his inferiority to animals not only in his
cruel maltreatment of girls before they have reached the age of
puberty,[119] but in his ignorance, in most cases, of the simplest
caresses and kisses for which we often find corresponding acts in
birds and other animals. The nerves of primitive men are too coarse
for such a delicate sensation as labial contact, and an embrace would
leave them cold. An African approximation to a kiss is described by
Baker (_Ismailia_, 472). He had liberated a number of female slaves,
and presently, he says, "I found myself in the arms of a naked beauty,
who kissed me almost to suffocation, and, with a most unpleasant
embrace, licked both my eyes with her tongue." If we may venture an
inference from Mr. A.H. Savage Landor's experience[120] among the
aboriginal Ainos of Yezo (Japan), one of the lowest of human races, we
may conclude that, in the course of evolution, biting preceded
kissing. He had made the acquaintance of an Ainu maiden, the most
lovely Ainu girl he had eve