POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
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tamarii hiiihia, uumihea, or tahihiay children stabbed or 
pierced with a sharp-pointed strip of bamboo cane, 
strangled by placing the thumbs on the throat, or 
tahihia^ trodden or stamped upon. These were the 
mildest methods | others, sometimes employed, were too 
barbarous to be mentioned. 
The parents themselves, or their nearest relatives, who 
often attended on the occasion for this express purpose, 
were the executioners. Often, almost before the new¬ 
born babe could breathe the vital air, gaze upon the light 
of heaven, or experience the sensations of its new 
existence, that existence has been extinguished by its 
cruel mother’s hand; and the felon sire,” instead of 
welcoming with all a father’s joy, a daughter or a son, 
has dug its grave upon the spot, or among the thick 
grown bushes a few yards distant. On receiving the 
warm palpitating body from its mother’s hand, he has, 
with awful unconcern, deposited the precious charge, not 
in a father’s arms, but in its early sepulchre; and 
instead of gazing, with all that thrilling rapture which 
a father only knows, upon the tender babe, has concealed 
it from his view, by covering its mangled form with the 
unconscious earth; and, to obliterate all traces of the deed, 
has trodden down the yielding soil, and strewed it 
over with green boughs, or covered it with verdant turf. 
This is not an exaggerated description, but the narrative 
of actual fact; other details, more touching and acute, 
have been repeatedly given to me in the islands, by 
individuals, who had been themselves employed in these 
unnatural deeds. 
The horrid act, if not committed at the time the infant 
entered the world, was not perpetrated at any subse¬ 
quent period. Whether this was a kind of law among 
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