To judge by their progress in the industrial arts, their elaborate political institutions, and the courtesy of their manners, the South Sea Islander, particularly the Tahitians, might claim a place among civilized nations, but in many respects they were still deeply plunged in barbarism. Their wars were sanguinary and cruel, their morals dissolute. Infanticide was extremely common among them, and the cause of this horrible crime was not the want of food but a culpable laziness. Although the fertility of the soil and the mildness of a delicious climate rendered it easy to provide for a large family, the general indolence was so great that a man with more than three children (a rare case) was looked upon as groaning under an intolerable burden, and thus thousands of infants were immolated to the love of ease of their unnatural parents. Human sacrifices were frequently offered to propitiate the gods--in war time, on the occasion of some great festival, of the illness or coronation of a king, or at the building of a temple. Each of the pillars which sustained the roof of one of these edifices was planted in the body of a wretch immolated in honour of the cruel divinity to whom the building was consecrated. To the honour of Polynesian humanity it must, however, be added, that the victims--either prisoners of war or persons who had incurred the enmity of some priest or noble--were not made to suffer any additional torment, but suddenly despatched by the unexpected blow of a club. In all the larger Polynesian groups the state of society briefly described in the foregoing pages has long since disappeared. In Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga, and Samoa, the ancient religion, the ancient customs, the ancient manufactures have more or less given way to European influences, and now only exist in the more remote or more insignificant islands where the missionary has either not appeared or which are too poor to tempt our avarice. The difference between the geological structure of the different islands of the Pacific has a marked influence upon the condition of their inhabitants. In the high and more extensive islands, where the structure is primitive and volcanic, the productions of the soil are more abundant and various, and the conditions for social development more favourable, than in the low small islands of a coralline structure, where food is less abundant, the sun more scorching, and generally the complexion of the inhabitants darker. While the Tahitians, Sandwich Islanders, Samoans, and Fijians cultivate the taro plant or pluck the fruits of the bread-fruit tree, the coral islander is frequently restricted to the nuts of the cocoa palm, or even to those of the screw pine, and adds to his sparing vegetable meal only a few crabs or fishes which he gathers on the reef or catches in the lagoon.