As to the future prospects of the Papuan race, there can hardly be a doubt that as soon as they come within the range of European emigration or dominion, their speedy extinction must be the result. Their very qualities will seal their doom, for a warlike and energetic people will never quietly submit to the yoke of a foreign master, and must as surely disappear before the white man as the wolf or the tiger. With the single and remarkable exception of the Feejee Islanders, who form a kind of intermediate race between the Papuan and Polynesian races, all the archipelagoes and islands of the tropical Pacific, situated on the east and north of the above-mentioned groups, are inhabited by nations distinguished from the Papuan stock by a yellow, olive-coloured, or brown skin; by smooth, generally black, hair; by a finer proportioned body, with well-rounded limbs and swelling muscles. The nations belonging to this yellow or Polynesian race have in general attained a much higher degree of civilisation than the black hordes of the western islands; and though enormous distances intervene between them, the inhabitants of the large groups of the Sandwich, Society, Navigators, and Friendly Islands, are more similar to each other than the various nations crowded together in the comparatively narrow space of our continent. Their features are everywhere the same; they speak dialects of the same language, so nearly resembling each other that the people of Tonga can freely converse with those of Hawaii; and when first visited by European navigators they showed a surprising similarity in their customs, their religious observances, and their political institutions, as well as in the progress they had made in agriculture and the industrial arts. Not satisfied with the spontaneous bounty of Nature, they forced the willing soil to yield them a variety of productions. The Tahitians, besides multiplying the bread-fruit tree and the cocoa palm, chiefly cultivated the banana, the sweet potato, and the yam; while the roots of the taro formed the principal nourishment of the Sandwich Islanders, who by an admirable system of irrigation extended the plantations of this water-loving plant, even high up the hills, where it grew in artificial ponds. These served likewise as basins for the reception of mullets, which were taken when quite young out of the sea, and placed in reservoirs into which some sweet water was made to flow. They were then gradually accustomed to water less and less salt, and ultimately, after five or six weeks, transferred to the submerged taro plantations, where they grew to a large size, and acquired a delicious flavour.