practised in order to lighten the burden of bringing up children.

They had no traditions as to how they reached this land, their
belief being that they had always been there but that their
forefathers were much greater than they. They were poetical, and
sang songs in a language which themselves they could not
understand; they said that it was the tongue their forefathers
had spoken. Also they had several strange customs of which they
did not know the origin. My own opinion, which Bickley shared,
was that they were in fact a shrunken and deteriorated remnant of
some high race now coming to its end through age and
inter-breeding. About them indeed, notwithstanding their
primitive savagery which in its qualities much resembled that of
other Polynesians, there was a very curious air of antiquity. One
felt that they had known the older world and its mysteries,
though now both were forgotten. Also their language, which in
time we came to speak perfectly, was copious, musical, and
expressive in its idioms.

One circumstance I must mention. In walking about the country I
observed all over it enormous holes, some of them measuring as
much as a hundred yards across, with a depth of fifty feet or
more, and this not on alluvial lands although there traces of
them existed also, but in solid rock. What this rock was I do not
know as none of us were geologists, but it seemed to me to
partake of the nature of granite. Certainly it was not coral like
that on and about the coast, but of a primeval formation.

When I asked Marama what caused these holes, he only shrugged
his shoulders and said he did not know, but their fathers had