THE GILBERT Oil KINGSMILL ISLANDS 543 



of the present inhabitants. The Gilbert or Kingsmill 

 group are British, and the Marshall Islands a German 

 possession, while the Ladrone, Pelew, and Caroline 

 Islands belong to Spain. 



2. The Gilbert or Kingsmill Islands. 



The Gilbert Archipelago, which was formally annexed 

 by Great Britain in May, 1892, consists of sixteen 

 islands, all coral reefs or atolls, and nowhere more than 

 20 feet above the sea. In some the land appears to 

 be rising rather rapidly. The soil is only a few inches 

 in depth, composed of coral sand and vegetable mould, in 

 which hardly anything but coco-nuts and pandanus will 

 grow spontaneously. There is no fern or grass, and not 

 a single land bird with the exception of the migratory 

 cuckoo JJrodynamis taiticnsis. A little taro {Arum cordi- 

 foliuin) is grown in trenches with great care. The 

 food of the people is mainly procured from the sea, and 

 ranges from the whale to the sea-slug. Great nunlbers 

 of fish are taken in the lagoons, and turtle are abun- 

 dant in the season. In such a barren group of islands 

 the means of procuring the necessaries of life seem scanty 

 enough, and it must require a constant expenditure of 

 labour and skill to maintain life, yet nowhere in the 

 most favoured portions of the Pacific is the population 

 more dense or more healthy than in these sterile islets. 

 Elsewhere in Mikronesia the sparseness of the population 

 is painful, but here the overflowing swarms are a continual 

 source of surprise. Some of the islands seem to form 

 one great village. The very smallest of these atolls, only 

 two miles across, has a population of from 1500 to 2000, 

 while Taputeuea has from 7000 to 8000. The population 

 of the whole group is estimated at over 40,000, while 



