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Rh, U.S. Navy, found 8,679 in the district of Rohalo in one year, and but 6,175 four years after. In the district of Hanapepe there were eight deaths recorded to one birth. Of 1,154 men, selected from one portion of the island, twenty-five only had a family of three children. Out of 637 elsewhere, ten only had three. The official reports give an average of half a child to each married couple on the whole island; of eighty married women only thirty-nine ever had offspring. Well might Mr. Wylie of the Foreign Office exclaim, "It is my frank belief that unless Hawaiian females can be rendered more pure and chaste, it is impossible to preserve the Hawaiian people in being." And yet they are the most civilized of the Pacific Islanders.

The same melancholy record is given of the interesting Samoans and other civilized South Sea people. They are accepting our religion, wearing our clothes, conforming to our habits, and hastening to their extinction. In spite of their former infanticides, murders, wars, cannibalism, the Fijians were the most populous of the ocean races; now those crimes have nearly ceased, and yet they are going the way of death.

It is with the Tasmanian's eastern neighbour, the Maori, that the devastation is as disastrous. From the official statistics the following facts are gleaned:—Of 222 wives in one district, 75 are reported barren; of 440 wives in another, 155 were barren. There were only 24,000 females to 31,000 males in 1868. A comparison of the two races is thus made: with one death in 136 of the White population, it was one in 33 of the Maori; and with one birth in 25 of the White, it was one in 67 of the other. These two causes must bring on ultimate extinction. One-fifth of the population passed away during the fourteen years previous to the census of 1858. That twenty per cent, will be greatly increased during the next fourteen, as decrepitude induces greater rapidity of extinction. In the district of Ngatikarewa, the magistrate declared that among seventeen women there was but one female child. "The present generation," writes the Rev. Mr. Ellis, "deeply sensible of the depopulation that has taken place, even within the recollection of those most advanced in years, have felt acutely in prospect of the annihilation that appeared inevitable." The Maories themselves have a poetical and affecting way of picturing their future:—"As clover killed