Golujk — Maori Medical Lore. 99 



in order to cause the bearers to conceive. The Tuhoe natives, 

 however, seem to have nursed them merely as the result of the 

 unsatisfied maternal instinct. Women who nursed and petted 

 these singular objects were wont to compose and sing songs 

 (oriori) or lullabies over them, precisely as they did to children 



Whare ngaro is an expression implying the death of all the 

 children of a couple, leaving them without offspring. This 

 affliction of a whare ngaro, or lost house, is said to be caused by 

 the evil influence of ancestral spirits, or is attributed to ma- 

 kutu (sorcery). When parents lost by death their first child they 

 would go to the tohunga and have the tu or a (or kawa or a) rite 

 performed over their second child, in order that the threatened 

 whare ngaro might be averted and the child survive. 



Maori women attribute sterility to the habitual use of fer- 

 mented food, in the form of maize which has been steeped in 

 water until putrid. This is purely a native idea, and one which 

 they consider is confirmed by the fact that fewer fertile women 

 are found among tribes where this food is a favourite article of 

 diet. Consanguineous marriages are also productive of sterility, 

 and Dr. Batty Tuke many years ago visited a fa (fortified village) 

 on the Wanganui River, named Marakowhai, where out of a 

 population of two hundred inhabitants only two fertile females 

 were to be found. That sterility is frequently the result of con- 

 sanguinity may be deduced from the fact that in many cases 

 where childless women have subsequently formed connections 

 with Europeans, large and healthy families have resulted. Prior 

 to the advent of the whites, early and excessive venery was an 

 important etiological factor, and after the arrival of the whaling 

 fleets was added the potent influence of venereal diseases. 



In 1845 Count Strzelecki* expressed the opinion " that when 

 an aboriginal (Australian) female had had a child to a European, 

 she lost her power of conception by a male of her own race, but 

 could produce children by a white man." Dr. Sarsfield Cassidy,f 

 in a paper read before the members of the New South Wales 

 Medical Council in 1898, supports Count Strzelecki's assertion, 

 and declared that " it had been proved, by overwhelming evidence, 

 that a healthy aboriginal male and female cannot beget children 

 should the female have lived with, and borne children to, a white 

 man." Strzelecki's statement was generally believed years ago. 

 and a recent medical work J states that the Count " believed this 

 to be the case with many aboriginal races ; but it has been dis- 

 puted, or at all events proved to be by no means a universal law. 

 in every case except that of the aborigines of Australia and 



* " Physical History of New South Wales." 



t Journ. Trop. Med., vol. i., p. 141. 



i " Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine," Gould and Pyle, p. 89. 



