The fecundity of these distant relations thus appears to be much higher than that of the specified relations, and a little higher even than that of the concubitants--the highest of the four groups. The comparative figures are as follows--
------------------------------------+---------------------------------- | Average Family. ------------------------------------+-----------+---------+------------ | Alive. | Dead. | Total. ------------------------------------+-----------+---------+------------ _Vei-ndavolani_ (concubitants) | 1·74 | 1·56 | 3·30 Relations (distant) | 1·48 | 1·85 | 3·33 ------------------------------------+-----------+---------+------------
The vitality therefore is much less in the case of relations distant than among the children of the concubitants.
The fecundity of the division, "relations specified," is lower than that of any of the four groups, and the vitality of their progeny is greatly inferior to any of the other classes.
For the last twenty years the Fijians have been either stationary, slightly increasing, or decreasing, according to the prevalence of foreign epidemics, the balance being in favour always of decrease. The different figures show that no class of the population replaces itself by surviving children of the marriage. But the deficiency is made up by the children of former marriages, and illegitimate children, who form a large portion of the population, but whose case it was not necessary to consider for the purposes of this chapter. But we find the startling fact that the class that most nearly succeeds in replacing itself is that of the concubitants, which, consisting of 133 families, or 266 individuals, have, out of a total number of children born to them of 438, a surviving progeny of 232. If we add the surviving step-children of these individuals, their total surviving progeny becomes 317, thus replacing the heads of existing families, and leaving 51 children to replace the parents of the step-children. In every respect the concubitants appear to be the most satisfactory marriage class. They amount to only 29·7 per cent. of the population, but they bear 33·3 per cent. of the children born, and they rear 34·2 of the children reared; and, including step-children, they rear 34·7 of the children who survive.