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CLASS I. - Reading, mental and written arithmetic, geography,
penmanship, and composition.
CLASS II. - Reading, mental arithmetic, geography, penmanship.
CLASS III. - Reading, first principles of arithmetic, penmanship.
CLASS IV. - Primer, use of slate and pencil.
The youngest children are not classified until they can put letters
together in syllables.
Vocal music is taught wherever competent teachers are found.
The total sum expended on education, including the grants to
"family" and other schools, is about $40,000 a year. {453}
It has been remarked that the rising race of Hawaiians has an
increased contempt for industry in the form of manual labour, and it
is proposed by the Board of Education that such labour shall be made
a part of common school education, so that on both girls and boys a
desire to provide for their own wants in an honest way shall be
officially inculcated. There is a Government Reformatory School,
and industrial and family schools for both girls and boys are
scattered over the islands. The supply of literature in the
vernacular is meagre, and few of the natives have any intelligent
comprehension of English.
The group has an area of about 4,000,000 acres, of which about
200,000 may be regarded as arable, and 150,000 as specially adapted
for the culture of sugar-cane. Sugar, the great staple production,
gives employment in its cultivation and manufacture to nearly 4,000
hands. Only a fifteenth part of the estimated arable area is under
cultivation. Over 6,000 natives are returned as the possessors of
Kuleanas or freeholds, but many of these are heavily mortgaged.
Many of the larger lands are held on lease from the crown or chiefs,
and there are difficulties attending the purchase of small
properties.
Almost all the roots and fruits of the torrid and temperate zones
can be grown upon the islands, and the banana, kalo, yam, sweet
potato, cocoanut, breadfruit, arrowroot, sugar-cane, strawberry,
raspberry, whortleberry, and native apple, are said to be
indigenous.
The indigenous fauna is small, consisting only of hogs, dogs, rats,
and an anomalous bat which flies by day: There are few insects,
except such as have been imported, and these, which consist of
centipedes, scorpions, cockroaches, mosquitoes, and fleas, are
happily confined to certain localities, and the two first have left
most of their venom behind them. A small lizard is abundant, but
snakes, toads, and frogs have not yet effected a landing.
The ornithology of the islands is scanty. Domestic fowls are
supposed to be indigenous. Wild geese are numerous among the
mountains of Hawaii, and plovers, snipe, and wild ducks, are found
on all the islands. A handsome owl, called the owl-hawk, is common.
There is a paroquet with purple feathers, another with scarlet, a
woodpecker with variegated plumage of red, green, and yellow, and a
small black bird with a single yellow feather under each wing.
There are few singing birds, but one of the few has as sweet a note
as that of the English thrush. There are very few varieties of
moths and butterflies.
The flora of the Hawaiian Islands is far scantier than that of the
South Sea groups, and cannot compare with that of many other
tropical as well as temperate regions. But all the islands are rich
in cryptogamous plants, of which there is an almost infinite
variety.
Hawaii is still in process of construction, and is subject to
volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves. Hurricanes are
unknown, and thunderstorms are rare and light.
Under favourable circumstances of moisture, the soil is most
prolific, and "patch cultivation" in glens and ravines, as well as
on mountain sides, produces astonishing results. A Kalo patch of
forty square feet will support a man for a year. An acre of
favourably situated land will grow a thousand stems of bananas,
which will produce annually ten tons of fruit. The sweet potato
flourishes on the most unpromising lava, where soil can hardly be
said to exist, and in good localities produces 200 barrels to the
acre. On dry light soils the Irish potato grows anyhow and
anywhere, with no other trouble than that of planting the sets.
Most vegetable dyes, drugs, and spices can be raised. Forty diverse
fruits present an overflowing cornucopia. The esculents of the
temperate zones flourish. The coffee bush produces from three to
five pounds of berries the third year after planting. The average
yield of sugar is two and a half tons to the acre. Pineapples grow
like weeds in some districts, and water melons are almost a drug.
The bamboo is known to grow sixteen inches in a day. Wherever there
is a sufficient rainfall, the earth teems with plenty.
Yet the Hawaiian Islands can hardly be regarded as a field for
emigration, though nature is lavish, and the climate the most
delicious and salubrious in the world. Farming, as we understand
it, is unknown. The dearth of insectivorous birds seriously affects
the cultivation of a soil naturally bounteous to excess. The narrow
gorges in which terraced "patch cultivation," is so successful,
offer no temptations to a man with the world before him. The larger
areas require labour, and labour is not to be had. Though wheat and
other cereals mature, attacks of weevil prevent their storage, and
all the grain and flour consumed are imported from California.
Cacao, cinnamon, and allspice, are subject to an apparently
ineradicable blight. The blight which has attacked the coffee shrub
is so severe, that the larger plantations have been dug up, and
coffee is now raised by patch culture, mainly among the guava scrub
which fringes the forests. Oranges suffer from blight also, and
some of the finest groves have been cut down.
