POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
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of the Roman empire. Many, in Tahiti especially, were 
plundered of their property, banished from their 
homes and their possessions, their houses were burnt, 
xnd they themselves hunted for sacrifices to be offered 
to Oro, merely because they were Bure Atua prayers to 
God. In some places, the persecutions were so invete¬ 
rate as to produce remonstrances, even from several of 
the inferior chiefs, who were themselves idolaters. 
The commencement of the year 1815 is distinguished, 
in the annals of Tahiti, by changes in society, affecting 
deeply, not only the religious, but the domestic condi¬ 
tion of the people, especially of the females. Idolatry 
had exerted all its withering and deadly influence, not 
only over every moment of their earthly existence, but 
every department of life, destroying, by its debasing and 
unsocial dictates, every tender feeling, and all the en¬ 
joyments of domestic intercourse. The father and the 
mother, with their children, never, as one social happy 
band, surrounded the domestic hearth, or, assembling 
under the grateful shade of the verdant grove, partook 
together, as a family, of the bounties of Providence. 
The nameless but delightful emotions, experienced on 
such occasions, were unknown to them, and all that 
we are accustomed to distinguish by the endearing 
appellation of domestic happiness. The institutes of 
Oro and Tane inexorably required, not only that the 
wife should not eat those kinds of food of which the 
husband partook, but that she should not eat in the 
same place, or prepare her food at the same fire. This 
restriction applied not only to the wife, with regard 
to her husband, but to all the individuals of the 
female sex, from their birth to the day of their death. 
In sickness or pain, or whatever other circumstances. 
