538 
COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TEAYEL 
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 difficult to 
say. Neither the diseases nor the ardent spirits intro¬ 
duced by Europeans are sufficient to account for it. By 
many writers wdio cannot be accused of bias, it is con- 
