after island, and as time went on to multiply exceedingly in their
new seats. In either case the end must be the same; soon or late
it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and that
famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent danger with
various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was found to
preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty
feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am
told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for
the teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with
famine and cannibalism. Among the Hawaiians--a hardier people, in
a more exacting climate--agriculture was carried far; the land was
irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the
number and diligence of the old inhabitants. Meanwhile, over all
the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed. On coral
atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were
enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment. On Vaitupu, in the
Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau,
but one. On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is
related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared.

This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or
so long-suffering with children--children make the mirth and the
adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for
picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of
them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and
the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together
undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the
deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the
eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of
observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous