nt 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 valley 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 pace 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 rambles to any considerable
distance towards 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 situation in the shadowy recesses along
the base of the mountains. At Nukuheva, two or three large quadrangular
'pi-pis', heavily flagged, enclosed with regular stone walls, and shaded
over and almost hidden from view by the interlacing branches of
enormous trees, were pointed out to me as burial-places. The bodies, I
understood, were deposited in rude vaults beneath the flagging, and were
suffered to remain there without being disinterred. Although nothing
could be more strange and gloomy than the aspect of these places, where
the lofty trees threw their dark shadows over rude blocks of stone,
a stranger looking at them would have discerned none of the ordinary
evidences of a place of sepulture.

During my stay in the valley, as none of its inmates were so
accommodating as to die and be buried in order to gratify my curiosity
with regard to their funeral rites, I was reluctantly obliged to
remain in ignorance of them. As I have reason to believe, however, the
observances of the Typees in these matters are the same with those of
all the other tribes in the island, I will here relat