e the cold is very great. While the properly called
Ladakians are peaceable, very desirous of learning, of an incarnated
laziness, and are never known to tell untruth; the Tchampas, on the
contrary, are very irascible, extremely lively, great liars and profess
a great disdain for the convents.

Among them lives the small population of Khombas, wanderers from the
vicinity of Lhassa, who lead the miserable existence of a troupe of
begging gipsies on the highways. Incapable of any work whatever,
speaking a language not spoken in the country where they beg for their
subsistence, they are the objects of general contempt, and are only
tolerated out of pity for their deplorable condition, when hunger drives
their mendicant bands to seek alms in the villages.

* * * * *

Polyandry, which is universally prevalent here, of course interested my
curiosity. This institution is, by the way, not the outcome of Buddha's
doctrines. Polyandry existed long before the advent of Buddha. It
assumed considerable proportions in India, where it constituted one of
the most effective means for checking the growth of a population which
tends to constant increase, an economic danger which is even yet
combatted by the abominable custom of killing newborn female children,
which causes terrible ravages in the child-life of India. The efforts
made by the English in their enactments against the suppression of the
future mothers have proved futile and fruitless. Manu himself
established polyandry as a law, and Buddhist preachers, who had
renounced Brahminism and preached the use of opium, imported this custom
into Ceylon, Thibet, Corea, and the country of the Moguls. For a long
time suppressed in China, polyandry, which flourishes in Thibet and
Ceylon, is also met with among the Kalmonks, between Todas in Southern
India, and Nairs on the coast of Malabar. Traces of this strange
constitution of the family are also to be found with the Tasmanians and
the Irquois Indians in North America.

Polyandry, by the way, has even flourished in Europe, if we may believe
Caesar, who, in his _De Bello Gallico_, book V., page 17, writes:
"_Uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes, et maxime fratres cum
fratribus et parentes cum liberis._"

In view of all this it is impossible to hold any religion responsible
for the existence of the institution of polyandry. In Thibet it can be
explained by motives of an economical nature; the