THE GILBERT OR 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 Urodynamis taitiensis. A little taro (Arum cordi- 
folium ) 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 numbers 
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 
