108 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
to be good and to be civilized; still others to reap a rich literary 
harvest in expatiating on lovely women with scant raiment and 
still seantier morals. 
We honestly liked the Fijians. They are physically a fine race, 
well built, muscular fellows, not flabby like many other Poly- 
nesians that we saw. They are upstanding and look the stranger 
in the eye without truculence on the one hand or servility on the 
other. They are wise in adhering to their native costume, the 
sulu, and wear neither hats, shoes nor stockings. They are con- 
siderably darker than most Polynesians we saw and exhibit a 
negroid strain, probably from an admixture in past times of blood 
from New Guinea or New Hebrides. As already mentioned, their 
chief ornament is their bushy head of hair that stands out four or 
five inches like a black or reddish-black halo and is really an im- 
posing and dignified affair. I notice from the narrative of the 
Wilkes Expedition that in 1840 many of the Fijians were heavily 
bearded, but at present they are almost universally without beards. 
It would be hard to find a greater or more rapid change for the 
better than has taken place in the Fijians during the last three 
generations. One has but to read the narrative of the famous 
Wilkes Expedition, which visited Fiji about 1840, to realize their 
condition at that time. Indeed the story is so revolting as to be 
almost ineredible. Constant wars, pillage, cannibalism, massacres 
of whole villages, parents murdered by strangulation or being 
buried alive by their own children, wives burned alive at the 
funeral of husbands, the killing of maimed persons and eating the 
flesh, often putrid, of even their dearest friends. All these atroc- 
ities fill many pages in the narrative as it relates to the main 
island of Vitilevu, and these conditions remained up to. the 
memory of men now living, one of whom I conversed with at Bau. 
Compare this nightmare with the people as we found them—a 
people courteous, kind, honest and law-abiding; with no experience 
of tribal war for many years, a people among whom the stranger 
can travel in perfect security; a people uniformly hospitable, even 
in the remotest jungles of the interior. And this is true not only 
of chiefs like Ratu Popé but poor people in their most primitive 
villages. 
No one ean contrast this situation with that prevailing a couple 
of generations ago without seeking the cause of the remarkable 
transformation. In my opinion it is due almost entirely to the 
wise Colonial policy of Great Britain on the one hand and the 
