108 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
Its effects also were rather sedative, than narcotic 
or inebriating. 
But after the Tahitians had been taught by 
foreign seamen, and natives of the Sandwich 
Islands, to distil spirits from indigenous roots, and 
rum had been carried to the islands in abundance 
as an article of barter, intoxication became almost 
universal; and all the demoralization, crimes, and 
misery, that follow in its train, were added to the 
multiplied sorrows and wasting scourges of the 
people. It nurtured indolence, and spread discord 
through their families, increased the abominations 
of the Areoi society, and the unnatural crime of 
infanticide. Before going to the temple to offer a 
human sacrifice to their gods, the priests have been 
known to intoxicate themselves, in order that they 
might be insensible to any unpleasant feelings this 
horrid work might excite. 
These causes operating upon a people, whose 
simple habits of diet rendered their constitutions 
remarkably susceptible of violent impressions, 
are, to a reflecting mind, quite sufficient to account 
for the rapid depopulation of the islands within the 
last fifty or sixty years. 
The philanthropist, however, will rejoice to 
know, that although sixteen years ago the nation 
appeared on the verge of extinction, it is now, 
under the renovating and genial principles of true 
religion, and the morality with which this is inse¬ 
parably connected, rapidly increasing. When the 
people in general embraced Christianity, we re¬ 
commended that a correct account of the births and 
deaths occurring in each of the islands should be 
kept. From the operation of the causes above 
enumerated, for some years even after the crimes 
in which they originated had ceased, the number 
