Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



of the New Zealanders, " They enjoy perfect 

 and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to 

 their towns, where young and old, men and women, 

 crowded about us. . . . we never saw a single person 

 who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor 

 among the numbers we have seen naked did we 

 once perceive the slightest eruption upon the 

 skin, or any marks that an eruption had left behind." 

 These are pretty strong words. Of course diseases 

 exist among such peoples, even where they have 

 never been in contact with civilisation, but I think 

 we may say that among the higher types of savages 

 they are rarer, and nothing like so various and 

 so prevalent as they are in our modern life ; while 

 the power of recovery from wounds (which are of 

 course the most frequent form of disablement) 

 is generally admitted to be something astonishing. 

 Speaking of the Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, " Their 

 state of health enables them to survive injuries 

 which would be almost instantly fatal to any 

 civilised European/* Mr. Frank Gates in his 

 Diary l mentions the case of a man who was con- 

 demned to death by the king. He was hacked 

 down with axes, and left for dead. " What 

 must have been intended for the coup de grace 

 was a cut in the back of the head, which had 

 chipped a large piece out of the skull, and must 

 have been meant to cut the spinal cord where it 

 joins the brain. It had, however, been made a 

 little higher than this, but had left such a wound 

 as I should have thought that no one could have 

 1 MatabeU Land and the Victoria Falls, p. 209. 



