Are We a Declining Race ? 



been known to commit suicide deliberately rather 

 than be left behind. Another peculiar method of 

 showing affection was that when parents became 

 old and decrepit, with no further prospects of 

 enjoyment in life, their children, still exhibiting 

 the deepest tokens of affection, would bury them 

 alive. Instead of wearing crape as a token of 

 mourning, they \vould take a piece of shell and 

 saw off one of their own finger-joints. 



We now come to the most important part of 

 their regime the matrimonial. They had a 

 system of polygamy, by which the chiefs had 

 three or four wives. In Fiji a plurality of wives 

 was looked upon as so much property, rather 

 than as the means of gratifying the passions, 

 therefore it was the best system which could have 

 prevailed under all the circumstances. The 

 chiefs were naturally the best men, and the race 

 was propagated from the best stock, while the 

 majority of the less perfect remained chaste. 

 The term chaste may be applied here, I think, in 

 its fullest sense. Take the following from 

 " Vita : an Account of a Government Mission to 

 the Fijian Islands," by Bardolph Seemann, Ph.D., 

 F.L.S., F.R.G.S., as an example of village life : 



" The men sleep at the Bure-ni-sa, or stranger's 

 house, those of about the same age sleeping 

 together ; whilst the boys, until they have been 

 admitted publicly into the society of the adults, 

 have a sleeping bure to themselves. It is quite 

 against Fijian ideas of delicacy that a man ever 

 remains under the same roof with his wife or 

 wives at night. [Italics mine. W. H.] In the 

 morning he goes home, and if not employed in 

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