Rude attempts to regulate the number of children next appeared. It has been suggested that this phase of primitive development argues mentality sufficient to foresee destruction of the tribe that does not provide for the future. Doubtless, in the mind of some savage Malthus, the idea that the tribe must allow at least a given number of children to live, was conceived with the warm glow of discovery. Among the Tokelaus, or Line Islanders, “no married pair are allowed by their law to have or bear more than four children; that is, only four get the chance of life. The woman has a right to rear, or endeavour to rear, one child. It rests with the husband to decide how many more shall live, and this depends on how much land there is to divide.”[54] On Radack Island a woman “is allowed to bring up only three children; her fourth and every succeeding one she is obliged to bury alive herself.”[55] Two boys and one girl were all that the Australian mother brought up, according to Curr, although the women bore an average of six children.[56] Economic ingenuity—and trepidity—could go no further than the practice in the Solomon Islands, where “a small portion of the Ugi natives have been born on the island, three-fourths of them having been brought as youths to supply the place of offspring killed in infancy. When a man needs support in his declining years, his props are not his own sons, but youths obtained by purchases from the St. Christoval natives.”[57] Another author says of the same islands that when “it becomes necessary to buy other children from other tribes good care is taken not to buy them too young.”[58] At Vaitupu, of the Ellice Islands, “only two children are allowed to a family, as they are afraid of a scarcity of food.”[59] It is on these coral islands that Robert Louis Stevenson says the fear of famine is greatest. He bears out the statement that only two children were allowed to a marriage on Vaitupu Island, and adds that on Nukufetu only one child was permitted; “on the latter the punishment was by fine, and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid and the child spared.”[60] In the Dieyerie tribe, of Australia, “thirty per cent. are murdered by their mothers at their birth, simply for the reasons—firstly, that many of them, marrying very young, their first-born is considered immature and not worth preserving; and secondly, because they do not wish to be at the trouble of rearing them, especially if weakly. Indeed all sickly and deformed children are made away with in fear of their becoming a burthen to the tribe.”[61] With the coming of ritual, man assumes to pacify his voracious deities by the sacrifices of children, thereby propitiating the gods and reducing the economic burden. The people of the Senjero offer up their “first-born sons as sacrifices, because, once upon a time, when summer and winter were jumbled together in bad season, and the fruits of the field would not ripen, the sooth-sayers enjoined it.”[62]