340 
POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
to provide for their offspring during the helpless 
periods of infancy and childhood, multitudes were 
consigned to an untimely grave. The females were 
subject to the most abasing degradation during the 
whole of their lives; and their sex was often, at their 
birth, the cause of their destruction: if the pur¬ 
pose of the unnatural parents had not been fully 
matured before, the circumstances of its being a female 
child, was often sufficient to fix their determination 
on its death. Whenever we have asked them, what 
could induce them to make a distinction so invidious, 
they have generally answered,—that the fisheries, the 
service of the temple, and especially war, were the only 
purposes for which they thought it desirable to rear chil¬ 
dren ; that in these pursuits women were comparatively 
useless; and therefore female children were frequently 
not suffered to live. Facts fully confirm these state¬ 
ments. 
In the adult population of the islands at the time of 
our arrival, the disproportion between the sexes was 
very great. There were, probably, four or five men to 
one woman. In all the schools established on the first 
reception of Christianity, the same disproportion pre¬ 
vailed. In more recent years the sexes are nearly equal. 
In addition to this cruel practice, others, equally unna¬ 
tural, prevailed, for which the people had not only the 
sanction of their priests, but the direct example of their 
respective deities. 
Without pursuing this painful subject any further, or 
inquiring into its antiquity or its origin, which is pro¬ 
bably co-equal with that of the monstrous Areoi institu¬ 
tions ; these details are of a kind that must impress 
every mind, susceptible of the common sympathies of 
