538 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TPAVEL 



It may thus be said that the Hawaiian Islands have 

 received their fauna from the most varied and distant 

 sources, and there is no doubt that a vast period of time 

 has been necessary to bring about the differentiation of 

 the species into such peculiar and interesting forms. 



The Kanakas, as the natives are called, are amongst the 

 finest and most intelligent peoples of the Pacific, and have 

 become thoroughly Europeanised, or perhaps rather 

 Americanised. The ladies model themselves quite after 

 the American fashion, and speak English in preference to 

 their mother tongue. All classes can read and write. 

 But here, as elsewhere in the Pacific, we find that a 

 decrease in the population has ensued since the advent of 

 Europeans which is little short of appalling. At the 

 time of Cook's visit the people were believed to number 

 300,000, while at the present time there are not more 

 than 40,000. To what point this reduction will proceed 

 cannot with certainty be predicated. Although extinction 

 would appear at first sight to be the inevitable result, yet, 

 judging from other instances, it need not be so, at all 

 events not in the immediate future. European contact 

 seems almost invariably to produce a sudden and rapid 

 decline of this kind, but it appears also that a point may 

 be reached beyond which this decline may not proceed, and 

 that the balance may in due course establish itself; the 

 race, if ultimately doomed, losing itself by absorption or 

 fusion, rather than by the inability of the individual to 

 resist disease or cope with the altered conditions of his 

 environment. 



What is the immediate cause of the depopulation of 

 these and other islands of Polynesia, it is very difiiicult to 

 say. Neither the diseases nor the ardent spirits intro- 

 duced by Europeans are sufficient to account for it. By 

 many writers who cannot be accused of bias, it is con- 



