202 RACES OF MEN. 



tame wild animals and keep many pets. They are skilled canoeists 

 and are the best makers of the ourali poison and the blow pipe. 

 Early marriages are forbidden and the women are virtuous. 



THE POLYNESIANS. 



The Polynesians inhabit the numerous small islands of the 

 Pacific. They are said to be mentally superior to any of the races 

 so far mentioned. Living under a tropical sun, they mature at a 

 very early age. Chastity not being one of their virtues, reproduc- 

 tion begins as soon as Nature permits. 5 Right at this point comes 

 in a peculiarity that distinguishes the Polynesians from all other 

 races. They practice infanticide, or at least have practiced it in the 

 past, and the manner in which they practiced it was to kill the first 

 three children born. Sometimes more would be killed up to eight 

 or ten, but the first three seems to have been the general standard 

 of practice. The result of this simply amounts to a postponement, 

 of from three to ten years, of the time of actual reproduction. Here 

 we have a race of people living under the same external conditions 

 as the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, equally if not more 

 licentious in their practices, and commencing reproduction at an 

 equally early age, but differentiating themselves by killing off all 

 of the early product and retaining only the later. If it be said that 

 the licentiousness and early reproduction of the Andamanese is 

 due to their low intelligence and not the low intelligence of these 

 practices, then what is the explanation of the vastly higher intelli- 

 gence of the Polynesians who indulge in the same practices? 



(5) Ratzel, in his History of Mankind, page 277 of the translation of 

 Butler, says that if a Polynesian girl of ten or twelve has not found a husband 

 she becomes the paramour of a man who keeps her until she can find some one 

 to marry her. Letourneau, in his Evolution of Marriage, quotes the surgeon 

 Roblet as saying that French sailors, when in Tahiti, were frequently offered 

 girls of eight years, "and," he adds, "they were not virgins." 



