(_Polynesian Researches_, 1832, vol. i, especially Chapters VI
and IX), while emphasizing their extreme cleanliness, every
person of every class bathing at least once or twice a day,
dwells on what he considers their unspeakable moral debasement;
"notwithstanding the apparent mildness of their disposition and
the cheerful vivacity of their conversation, no portion of the
human race was ever perhaps sunk lower in brutal licentiousness
and moral degradation."

After leaving Tahiti Cook went on to New Zealand. Here he found
that the people were more virtuous than at Tahiti, and also, he
found, less clean.

It is, however, a mistake to suppose that physical uncleanliness ruled
supreme through mediæval and later times. It is true that the eighteenth
century, which saw the birth of so much that marks our modern world,
witnessed a revival of the old ideal of bodily purity. But the struggle
between two opposing ideals had been carried on for a thousand years or
more before this. The Church, indeed, was in this matter founded on an
impregnable rock. But there never has been a time when influences outside
the Church have not found a shelter somewhere. Those traditions of the
classic world which Christianity threw aside as useless or worse quietly
reappeared. In no respect was this more notably the case than in regard to
the love of pure water and the cult of the bath. Islam adopted the
complete Roman bath, and made it an institution of daily life, a necessity
for all classes. Granada is the spot in Europe where to-day we find the
most exquisite remains of Mohammedan culture, and, though the fury of
Christian conquest dragged the harrow over the soil of Granada, even yet
streams and fountains spring up there and gush abundantly and one seldom
loses the sound of the plash of water. The flower of Christian chivalry