 by
hundreds.
    Notwithstanding the existence of wedlock among the Typees, the scriptural
injunction to increase and multiply seems to be but indifferently attended to. I
never saw any of those large families, in arithmetical or step-ladder
progression, which one often meets with at home. I never knew of more than two
youngsters living together in the same home, and but seldom even that number. As
for the women, it was very plain that the anxieties of the nursery but seldom
disturbed the serenity of their souls; and they were never to be seen going
about the valley with half a score of little ones tagging at their
apron-strings, or rather at the bread-fruit leaf they usually wore in the rear.
    The ratio of increase among all the Polynesian nations is very small; and in
some places as yet uncorrupted by intercourse with Europeans, the births would
appear but very little to outnumber the deaths; the population in such instances
remaining nearly the same for several successive generations, even upon those
islands seldom or never desolated by wars, and among people with whom the crime
of infanticide is altogether unknown. This would seem expressly ordained by
Providence to prevent the overstocking of the islands with a race too indolent
to cultivate the ground, and who, for that reason alone, would, by any
considerable increase in their numbers, be exposed to the most deplorable
misery. During the entire period of my stay in the village of Typee, I never saw
more than ten or twelve children under the age of six months, and only became
aware of two births.
    It is to the absence of the marriage tie that the late rapid decrease of the
population of the Sandwich Islands and of Tahiti is in part to be ascribed. The
vices and diseases introduced among these unhappy people annually swell the
ordinary mortality of the islands, while, from the same cause, the originally
small number of births is proportionally decreased. Thus the progress of the
Hawaiians and Tahitians to utter extinction is accelerated in a sort of compound
ratio.
    I have before had occasion to remark that I never saw any of the ordinary
signs of a place of sepulture in the valley, a circumstance which I attributed,
at the time, to my living in a particular part of it, and being forbidden to
extend my ramble to any considerable distance toward the sea. I have since
thought it probable, however, that the Typees, either desirous of removing from
their sight the evidences of mortality, or prompted by a taste for rural beauty,
may have some charming cemetery situated in the shadowy recesses along the base
of the mountains. At Nukuheva,
