“Pride and anger combined often lead to self-destruction. ...  The most common method of suicide in Fiji is by jumping over a precipice.  This is, among the women, the fashionable way of destroying themselves; but they sometimes resort to the rope.  Of deadly poisons they are ignorant, and drowning would be a difficult thing; for from infancy they learn to be almost as much at home in the water as on dry land.”

In his book on the Melanesians Codrington says (243) that

“a wife jealous of her husband, or in any way incensed at him, would in former times throw herself from a cliff or tree, swim out to sea, hang or strangle herself, stab herself with an arrow, or thrust one down her throat; and a man jealous or quarrelling with his wife would do the like; but now it is easy to go off with another’s wife or husband in a labor vessel to Queensland or Fiji.”

There is one class of men in Fiji who are not likely to commit suicide.  They are the bachelors, who, though they are scorned and frowned on in this life, must look forward to a worse fate after death.  There is a special god, named Nangganangga—­“the bitter hater of bachelors”—­who watches for their souls, and so untiring is his watch, as Williams was informed (206), that no unwedded spirit has ever reached the Elysium of Fiji.  Sly bachelors sometimes try to dodge him by stealing around the edge of a certain reef at low tide; but he is up to their tricks, seizes them and dashes them to pieces on the large black stone, just as one shatters rotten fire-wood.

SAMOAN TRAITS

Cruel and degraded as the Fijians are, they mark a considerable advance over the Australian savages.  A further advance is to be noted as we come to the Samoans.  Cannibalism was indulged in occasionally in more remote times, but not, as in Fiji, owing to a relish for human flesh, but merely as a climax of hatred and revenge.  To speak of roasting a Samoan chief is a deadly insult and a cause for war (Turner, 108).  Sympathy was a feeling known to Samoans; their treatment of the sick was invariably humane (141).  And whereas in Australia, Borneo, and Fiji, it is just as honorable to slay a female as a male, Samoans consider it cowardly to kill a woman (196).  Nor do they practise infanticide; but this abstinence is counterbalanced by the fact that the custom of destroying infants before birth prevailed to a melancholy extent (79).

Yet here as everywhere we discover that the sexual refinement on which the capacity for supersensual love depends comes last of the virtues.  The Rev. George Turner, who had forty years of experience among the Polynesians, writes (125) that at their dances “all kinds of obscenity in looks, language, and gesture prevailed; and often they danced and revelled till daylight.”  The universal custom of tattooing was connected with immoral practices (90).  During the wedding ceremonies of chiefs the friends of the bride