[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

234 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

called father and mother, and the cousins are called
sister and brother.

However, this exogamic system could not prevent
inbreeding, as there was always the possibility that
uncles and nieces might marry, so that a “horizontal”
system was superimposed across this “vertical” one,
forbidding all marriages between different genera-
tions. Thus, all marriages between near relations
being impossible, the chances to marry at all are
considerably diminished, so that nowadays, with the
decreased population, a man very often cannot find a
wife, even though surrounded by any number of girls.
I do not mean to imply by this that the whole clan-
system was organized simply to prevent inbreeding.

As I have said before, young men, as a rule,
either cannot marry, being too poor to buy a wife, or,
at best, can only afford to pay for an old widow, a
low-priced article. The young, pretty girls are
generally bought by old men, who often buy them
when children, paying half the price down, and
waiting till the girl is of marriageable age. As
soon as she is old enough, she has to work for her
future husband, and is under the care of one of his
wives. Later on, the husband pays the rest of the
money, builds a house for the girl, and the marriage
takes place without any ceremony beyond a dinner
to the nearest relatives of the couple. In most
islands the girl cannot object to a match otherwise
than by running away from a disagreeable husband.
Generally, when she has run away several times, and
repeated beatings have not changed her mind, her