328 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
tended victim survived only one day, and fre¬ 
quently not more than a few hours, it was ge¬ 
nerally saved. Depraved as they were, they could 
not afterwards sacrifice to a barbarous custom an 
innocent babe, who seemed to look with confi¬ 
dence to its mother or its nurse, and uncon¬ 
sciously smiled upon those who stood by: hence 
the parties interested in the child’s destruction, 
which were the parents themselves, or their re¬ 
lations, generally strangled it soon after its birth. 
But among the Sandwich Islanders, the infant, 
after living a week, a month, or even a year, was 
still insecure, as some were destroyed when nearly 
able to walk. 
It is painful to think of the numbers thus 
murdered. All the information we have been able 
to obtain, and the facts that have come to our 
knowledge in the neighbourhood where we resided, 
afford ever reason to believe, that from the pre¬ 
valence of infanticide two-thirds of the children 
perished. We have been told by some of the 
chiefs, on whose word we can depend, that they 
have known parents to murder three or four infants, 
where they have spared one. But even supposing 
that not more than half the children were thus cut 
off, what an awful spectacle of depravity is pre¬ 
sented ! how many infants must have been an¬ 
nually sacrificed to a custom so repugnant to all 
the tenderest feelings of humanity, that, without 
the clearest evidence, we should not believe it 
would be found in the catalogue of human crimes. 
The reasons they give for this practice manifest 
a degree of depravity no less affecting. Among 
the Marquesians, who inhabit a group of islands 
to the south-east of Hawaii, we are told that 
children are sometimes, during seasons of extreme 
