OF THE SOUTH SEAS 363 



the KoUimallais hills, have the same custom. Inbreed- 

 ing maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost of its 

 vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. 

 Examples to the contrary are numerous in human and 

 animal life. More than nine hundred residents of Nor- 

 folk Island are descendants of the mutineers of the 

 British ship Boimty. They were begat by eight of the 

 mutineers, and intermarried for a century. They show 

 no deterioration from this cause. 



Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but 

 the abomination grew slowly as man progressed. Such 

 ties have been abhorrent for long in most countries. A 

 belief that incestuous children were weak mentally or 

 physically came much later in the ages. The Poly- 

 nesians must have remarked that inbreeding accentuated 

 the faults in a strain, making for an accumulation of 

 them. This would be a very far advance in human ob- 

 servation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowl- 

 edge brought from his old Asiatic home, must have held 

 such a theory, and sought in the system of adoption, and 

 in not bringing up consanguineous children together, to 

 ward off such misfortune. This at least is a plausible 

 reason for such an unnatural practice among a people 

 so unquestionably child-lovers. 



The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. 

 There were no exogamous taboos. The tribe or clan 

 was the chief unit, not the family. The phratry tie was 

 stronger than that of the father and mother. In the 

 totem scheme of other islands and continental groups all 

 the women of his mother's totem were taboo to a man, 

 though their relationship might be remote. Yet as hus- 

 band and wife had different totems, and children took 



