Among the members of the Areoi society, a peculiar and somewhat “secret” society[68] of the islands of the Pacific, “a man with three or four children, and this was a rare occurrence, was said to be a _taata taubuubuu_, a man with an unwieldy or cumbrous burden; and there is reason to believe that, simply to avoid the trifling care and effort necessary to provide for their offspring during the helpless period of infancy and childhood, multitudes were consigned to an untimely grave.” A Malthusian motive has sometimes been adduced, and the natives have been heard to say, that if all the children born were allowed to live, there would not be food enough produced in the islands to support them.[69] From many authorities comes direct evidence of a clash between the man and the woman in the Polynesian Islands. “As the burden of the plantation and other work devolves on the woman, she thinks that she cannot attend to more than two or three children, and the rest must be buried as soon as they are born. There are exceptions to this want of maternal affection. At times the husband urges the thing contrary to the wishes of the wife. If he thinks the infant will interfere with her work, he forcibly takes the little innocent and buries it, and she, poor woman, cries for months after her child.”[70] Among the nomadic tribes it is frankly admitted that the children are a hindrance. The Lenguas, of the Paraguayan Chaco, make journeys of from ten to twenty miles, the women doing most of the hard work. The consequence is that children are not desirable. So with the Abipones, of whom Charlevoix says: “They seldom rear but one child of each sex, murdering the rest as fast as they come into the world, till the eldest are strong enough to walk alone. They think to justify this cruelty by saying that, as they are almost constantly travelling from one place to another, it is impossible for them to take care of more infants than two at a time; one to be carried by the father, and the other by the mother.”[71] [Illustration: ZULU GIRL WITH BABY. THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSURE ENDED AMONG THE ZULUS ONLY WITHIN THE PRESENT GENERATION] [Illustration: A HINDU CHILD-MOTHER, WHOSE CARES WILL MAKE HER OLD AT THIRTY] The explanation offered by the Kurnai was that “it was often difficult to carry about young children, particularly where there were several. Their wandering life rendered this very difficult.”[72] In the struggle with nature, man descends as well as ascends. The unfavourable conditions into which nomadic tribes frequently come produce not infrequently, a perverted type that is lower than the animals to which our semi-human progenitors of the extremely remote past belonged. “The instincts of the lower animals,” says Darwin, “are never so perverted as to lead them to regularly destroy their own offspring or to be quite devoid of jealousy.”[73]