It may be objected, that Dr Arbuthnot, in quoting the bills of mortality for twenty years, gave most unexceptionable grounds for his opinion, and that my single assertion of what happens in a foreign country, without further foundation, cannot be admitted as equivalent testimony; and I am ready to admit this objection, as bills of mortality there are none in any of these countries. I shall therefore say in what manner I attained the knowledge which I have just mentioned. Whenever I went into a town, village, or inhabited place, dwelt long in a mountain, or travelled journies with any set of people, I always made it my business to inquire how many children they had, or their fathers, their next neighbours, or acquaintance. This not being a captious question, or what any one would scruple to answer, there was no interest to deceive; and if it had been possible, that two or three had been so wrong-headed among the whole, it would have been of little consequence.
I then asked my landlord at Sidon, (suppose him a weaver,) how many children he has had? He tells me how many sons, and how many daughters. The next I ask is a smith, a tailor, a silk-gatherer, the Cadi of the place, a cowherd, a hunter, a fisher, in short every man that is not a stranger, from whom I can get proper information. I say, therefore, that a medium of both sexes arising from three or four hundred families indiscriminately taken, shall be the proportion in which one differs from the other; and this, I am confident, will give the result to be three women to one man in 50° out of the 90° under every meridian of the globe.
Without giving Mahomet all the credit for abilities that some have done, we may surely suppose him to know what happened in his own family, where he must have seen this great disproportion of four women born to one man; and from the obvious consequences, we are not to wonder that one of his first cares, when a legislator, was to rectify it, as it struck at the very root of his empire, power, and religion. With this view, he enacted, or rather revived, the law which gave liberty to every individual to marry four wives, each of whom was to be equal in rank and honour, without any preference but what the predilection of the husband gave her. By this he secured civil rights to each woman, and procured a means of doing away that reproach, of _dying without issue_, to which the minds of the whole sex have always been sensible, whatever their religion was, or from whatever part of the world they came.