POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
109 
prayer. Such was the rapidity with which places for 
public worship were erected^ that at the close of 1818 , 
twelve months only after the battle of Narii, near Buna- 
auia, there were sixty-six in the island of Tahiti alone. 
Since the establishment of the stations in Huahine 
and the other islands, the number has been greatly 
diminished; the people in many parts have resorted to 
the Missionary settlement, particularly on the Sabbath | 
and the places formerly used as chapels have been con¬ 
verted into schools. Places now used for worship in the 
islands, although not so numerous as formerly, are much 
more convenient and substantial. The walls are either 
of plank or plaster, the floors are boarded, and the area 
within is fitted up with a pulpit, desk, and pews, or 
seats. Some have neat and commodious galleries ; and 
in the island of Eimeo, on the site of the temple of 
which Patii was priest, a neat and substantial chapel 
has been built with white hewn coral. 
I have not heard that glass windows have been intro¬ 
duced into the chapels of any of the stations. Cushions 
have not yet intruded into any of the pews, and only into 
one of the pulpits. 
No native chapel is yet furnished with a public 
clock; and although it would be a valuable article, there 
is not such a thing in the South Sea Islands. The 
stations have also been hitherto but indifferently supplied 
with a far more useful appendage to their places of public 
worship than even a dial ; namely, a bell. Whatever may 
be said of the inutility of bells in churches or chapels 
in civilized countries, where public clocks are nume¬ 
rous, and watches almost universal—^the same objections 
will not apply to a people destitute of these, and having 
no means of denoting the hour of the day, except by men- 
