3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Mr. Thurston, the originator of the new system of taxation, had 

 come to Fiji as a common sailor before the mast, but he lived to be 

 Governor of Fiji from 1888 to 1896, and died as Sir John Thurston, 

 universally beloved by the race for whose uplifting he had contended 

 so courageously and well, and thus in Fiji there live to-day the hap- 

 piest, the most law-abiding and potentially the most nearly civilized 

 natives in the Pacific. It is one of the very few instances wherein a 

 powerful and enlightened race have studied and toiled through many 

 unrequited years to lift to a happier level a poor and barbarous people. 



There is no longer in Fiji that painful contrast of which Wilkes 

 complained between the beauty of the island scenery and the character 

 of the inhabitants, for consistently in all respects the archipelago is now 

 one of the fairest spots within the tropic world. 



Nowhere in the Pacific did old customs change more slowly under 

 European rule than in Fiji, for it has been the consistent policy of the 

 British government to leave unaltered all that was good in the manners 

 of old days. 



The villages are almost as they were before the white man came, 

 only the log stockades and the encircling moats have disappeared during 

 the long years of peace, and the houses are no longer perched upon the 

 summits of aerie cliffs, but now cluster along the river-banks or under 

 the cocoa palms of the seashore. The high-peaked Mbures or temples, 

 once such a picturesque feature, have fallen into decay with the advent 

 of Christianity, although one thinks they might well have been pre- 

 served, enlarged and converted into Christian churches, for the taste- 

 ful sennit patterns which adorned their beams and rafters would have 

 made the chapel the most attractive house in the village instead of 

 being, as it too often is, a cheerless barn-like structure, ill-proportioned 

 without and barren within. 



The better types of native houses are set upon artificial embank- 

 ments of stones and earth, sometimes twenty feet high, as in the valley 

 of the Rewa River, where floods may be expected. The framework is of 

 tree fern or cocoanut logs, ingeniously lashed together, and the sides 

 and roof are covered with a thick thatch of wild cane, or cocoanut 

 leaves spread over ferns. The roof is quite thin at the peak, but is 

 fully a foot and a half thick at the eaves, where it projects slightly, 

 and is cut off squarely, presenting a very neat appearance. The ground- 

 plan of the house is usually rectangular, not oval at its ends, as in 

 Tahiti, and the peaked roof has a long ridge-pole which projects several 

 feet beyond the eaves and, if the residence be that of a chief, is thickly 

 studded with white Cyprcea cowrie shells, and sometimes other cowrie 

 shells are strung upon ropes of cocoanut fiber sennit and hung pendant 

 from the projecting ridge-pole. There are no windows, but several 

 openings serve as doors and may in time of rain be closed with mats. 



