ed in Lancerote and
possibly in Fuerteventura, often assigning one woman to three husbands;
but in the other islands of the group monogamy was strictly
maintained.[998] In Oceanica polygamy, monogamy or polyandry prevails
according to a man's means, the poverty of the islands, and the supply
of women. A plurality of wives is always the privilege of the chiefs and
the wealthy, but all three forms of marriage may be found on the same
island. Scarcity of women gives rise to polyandry in Tahiti,[999] and
consigns one woman to four or five men. In old Hawaii, where there were
four or five men to one woman a kind of incipient polyandry arose by the
addition of a countenanced paramour to the married couple's
establishment.[1000] Robert Louis Stevenson found the same complaisant
arrangement a common one in the Marquesas, where the husband's deputy
was designated by the term of _pikio_ in the native vocabulary.[1001]
Polyandry existed in Easter Isle, among whose stunted and destitute
population the men far exceeded the women, and children were few,
according to reports of the early visitors.[1002] Numerous other
instances make this connection between island habitat, deficiency of
women, need of checking increase, and polyandrous marriages an obvious
one.[1003]

[Sidenote: Infanticide.]

This disproportion of the sexes in Oceanica is due to the murder of
female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation,
licentiousness, and the violence of the men.[1004] The imminence of
famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which
infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica. In some parts of
the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is so habitual, that in some
families all children are killed, and substitutes purchased at
will.[1005] In the well-tilled Fiji Islands, a pregnant girl is strangled
and her seducer slain. The women make a practice of drinking medicated
waters to produce sterility. Failing in this, the majority kill their
children either before or after birth. In the island of Vanua Levu
infanticide reaches from one-half to two-thirds of all children
conceived; here it is reduced to a system and gives employment to
professional murderers of babies, who hover like vultures over every
child-bed. All destroyed after birth are females.[1006] And yet here, as
on many other islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, such offspring as are
spared are treated with foolish fondness and indulgence.[1007] The