When told that these children were born at annual intervals, and that such occurrences were common in Europe, they were very much shocked, and thought it explained sufficiently why so many white people were “mere shrimps.” After childbirth, among the Fijians, husband and wife separate and live apart for three and even four years, “so that no other baby may interfere with the time considered necessary for suckling the children, in order to make them strong and healthy.”[78] [78] Seeman, _A Mission to Viti_, p. 191. Through such wise regulations as these, governing the sexual relations, the drain on the vital forces observed among the women of civilized countries is avoided, and it was doubtless to these rules and others of a similar character that women, throughout untold ages of human existence, were enabled to maintain a position of independence and supremacy. We are informed that among the Fijians the birth of a child is cause for a perfect jubilee; that parental and filial affection is among the manifest virtues of this people. After referring to the truthfulness and honesty of the Dyaks of Borneo, Mr. Wallace says that “in several matters of morality they rank above most uncivilized, and even above many civilized, nations. They are temperate in food and drink, and the gross sensuality of the Chinese and Malays is unknown among them.”[79] Although the usual checks to population are absent among the Dyaks—namely, starvation, disease, war, infanticide, and vice,—still the women in the Dyak tribe rarely had more than three or four children. In a village in which there were one hundred and fifty families, in only one of them were there six children, and only six with five children. [79] _The Malay Archipelago._ In whatever direction we turn, evidences are abundant going to prove that under simpler and more natural conditions, and before corrupted by our later civilization, mankind were governed largely by the instincts developed within the female constitution, and that long after her supremacy over the male was lost, the effects of these purer conditions were manifest in the customs, forms, and usages of the people.