To sum up: of 129 living husbands nine had apparently faced the probability or certainty of having no sons by their current wife. Of these three had had recourse to divorce, two to bigamy and four had taken no steps at all though one was still likely to do so. Thirty-six marriages, including two remarriages after divorce, had still grounds for hope. The rest, eighty-six, had sons. These include cases where a man had had two wives, because the first had died, but sons by only one. We can then say that roughly nine-tenths of men achieve male heirs either by their first marriage or by wives married as replacements when their first dies. Of the remaining tenth some divorce and remarry, more than once if necessary, some marry polygamously, and some take no action at all.
The stability of secondary and replacement marriages is markedly less. Of thirty-eight recorded, four ended in divorce, that is about one in ten. The reasons are not difficult to understand. The same grounds for divorce still hold, but the additional one of personal incompatibility is added. By definition at least one partner in a secondary marriage has been married before. Very commonly a bereaved widower is bringing a woman of whom he knows little into a functioning household which she has to take over and run. They have no time for gradual adjustment to each other's idiosyncracies. True, in a culturally homogeneous society the possible differences in household routine are limited, but even so it would be surprising if there were not a multitude of small frictions between the man and his new housekeeper and bedfellow, and between her and her predecessor's children.
Among secondary marriages there are also a number of special cases. Sterile men are likely to try a number of wives before they give up hope of producing children. Some of those who have abandoned or divorced spouses have already lost their honour, or most of it, and are not subject to the pressure of public opinion. Some of the wives available for replacement are available precisely because they have already proved unsatisfactory. The girl who had deserted four husbands by the age of twenty is an extreme example.