328 AUSTRALASIAN AND POLYNESIAN 
sacrifice, that the nude body should not be reviled as ‘“‘the carcase 
of an uncircumcised wretch.” It was considered to be sufficiently 
remarkable to be handed down in tradition that amongst the 
sixty who fell in the important battle of Maueue, fought about 
184 years ago, were two uncircumcised youths. 
Secondly and principally, the performance of this rite was, and 
still is, absolutely indispensable to marriage. No Hervey Island 
woman would knowingly marry an uncircumcised husband. A 
few years ago a young man, a church member, complained to me 
that nothing could induce his wayward spouse to live with him. 
The near relatives of the woman had again and again taken the 
truant wife back to her husband, but in vain. I requested a 
deacon to go and remonstrate with her upon her conduct. The 
dark-skinned shrew said to the deacon, “ What! ask me to go and 
live with an uncircumcised husband? Never!” A year or two 
afterwards, severe illness caused her to alter her mind. 
The greatest insult that can be offered to a man is to accuse 
him of being uncircumcised. The contemptuous expressions in 
the sacred writings, in reference to the uncircumcised Gentiles, 
seem to the Hervey Islanders to be quite natural. 
This epithet, put in the most offensive way, led to war some 
years prior to the introduction of Christianity to the island of 
Mangaia, in the Hervey Group. The predecessor of Numangatini, 
the late king of Mangaia, was on one occasion thus reviled, 
without reason, by his maternal uncle. The irate sovereign 
demanded that his two maternal uncles should be slain, and 
presented in sacrifice to the god Rongo, by way of atonement for 
the insult. The leading warriors of the day declined to carry 
out his insane wish. Two bloody battles resulted from the 
king’s persistence. 
The first native pastors set their faces like flint against the 
practice of circumcision. The entire despotic power of the great 
warrior chief, who embraced Christianity, was brought to bear 
upon the extinction of this custom, but utterly failed to uproot it. 
My predecessor wisely persuaded the chiefs to blot circumcision, 
as a crime, out of their statute-book. 
Numbers of white men in the Eastern Pacific Islands, married 
to native women, have submitted to this degrading custom to 
please their wives. 
The natives of Peurhyus, Manihiki, Rakaauga, Pukapuka, and 
Niue, also the Ellice and Gilbert Islanders, do not practise 
circumcision, although the parent stock of all those islanders still 
observe it. The reason for its disuse, doubtless, was the fact that 
in all those islands the sharp red quartz, invariably used in 
circumcising, is not found. Bamboo is unsuitable for the opera- 
tion; like Zipporah of old, they “take a sharp stone” for a knife. 
In the Southern New Hebrides, z.c., Fotuna, Aniwa, Aneityum, 
Tauna, and one half of Erromanga, circumcision is universally 
