Note 996 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

While emigration draws off the surplus population, there tend to develop in islands, as also in barren highlands where population early reaches the point of saturation, various devices to restrict natural increase. The evils of congestion are foreseen and guarded against. Abbé Raynal, writing of islanders in general, remarked as far back as 1795, "It is among these people that we trace the origin of that multitude of singular institutions which retards the progress of population. Anthropophagy, the castration of males, the infibulation of females, late marriages, the consecration of virginity, the approbation of celibacy, the punishments exercised against girls who become mothers at too early an age," he enumerates as such checks. Malthus, in his Essay on Population, commenting on this statement, notes that the bounds to the number of inhabitants on islands, especially small ones, are so narrow and so obvious that no one can ignore them.996