Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/79

 restraint in them. The women were trained with a view to amorous sports; they were fattened on a soup of bread fruit, and from earliest infancy taught by their mothers to dance the timorodie, a very lewd dance, accompanied by appropriate words. The conversation also was in keeping with the morals. "One thing which particularly struck me," says Moerenhout, "as soon as I began to understand their language, was the extreme licence in conversation—a licence pushed to the limit of most shameless cynicism, and which is the same even with the women; for these people think and talk of nothing but sensual pleasure, and speak openly of everything, having no idea of the euphemisms of our civilised societies, where we use double meanings and veiled words, or terms that are permitted in mentioning things which would appear revolting and cause scandal if plainly expressed; but these islanders could not understand this, and the missionaries have never been able to make them do so."

Lastly, the existence of the religious and aristocratic society of the Areoïs, in Tahiti and other archipelagoes, finishes the picture of the mental condition of the Polynesians as regards morals. Without describing afresh this curious association, I shall only remind my readers that it had for its object an unrestrained and public abandonment to amorous pleasures, and that, for this reason, the community of women and the obligation of infanticide were decreed.

During the last century sentimentality invaded the brains of thinkers and writers like an epidemic, and gave rise to the belief that primitive man, or "man in a state of nature," as the phrase went, was the model of all virtues. But we must discount much of this. As we might naturally expect, the uncultivated man is a mammal of the grossest kind. We have already seen that his sexual morality is extremely loose, and necessarily so; we are, however, surprised to find him addicted to certain aberrations from nature which the chroniclers of the Greco-Latin world have accustomed us to regard as the result of a refined and depraved civilisation,—*