DEFORMITIES. I77 



island, the water of which when drunk is said to produce " swollen 

 legs." For this reason the water is never employed ; and the ban 

 is even extended to the cocoa-nut trees on its banks. 



Natives, who are the subjects of such congenital deformities as 

 " hare-lip," are rarely seen. Verj' probably in such cases life is de- 

 stroyed by the parents soon after birth. I only observed one instance 

 of " hare-lip " which occurred in the case of a man of Simbo. This 

 malformation, which was of the single character, was associated with 

 abnormal development of crisp hair on the body and more par- 

 ticularly on the back. As an instance of another kind of congenital 

 deformity, which however came but rarely under my observation, I 

 may refer to a man of Ugi who had six perfect toes on the right foot, 

 both fifth and sixth toes being provided with nails and apparently 

 arising from a common metatarsal bone. None of his family had 

 the same deformity, which in his case was probably inconvenient in 

 more ways than one, as the print of his foot was familiar to every 

 native in the island.^ 



Strabismus is not uncommon amongst the natives of these islands, 

 and appears to occur with the same relative frequency as amongst 

 more civilised people. 



Venereal diseases, both constitutional and local, are said by traders 

 to be very frequent in certain islands, as in Ugi, which have had 

 most intercourse with the outer world. I rarely however came 

 upon unequivocal evidence of the constitutional form of these 

 diseases, those cases which came under my immediate observation 

 being of the non-constitutional types which, as in other tropical 

 regions, are often of a rapidly destructive character. The natives of 

 Ugi assert that these diseases have not been introduced within the 

 memory of any living man, and no tradition prevails with reference 

 to their origin. I shall scarcely enter into the question of the in- 

 troduction of these diseases into the more central groups of the 

 Pacific, a subject which is discussed in most of the narratives of the 

 early expeditions to those regions, but in a spirit of unfairness and 

 mutual recrimination which goes far to invalidate the conclusions 

 arrived at. Negative evidence, however, must be of a ver}'' exhaus- 

 tive character before it would warrant the inference that to the 

 licence, so freely permitted to the crews of the English and French 

 expeditions during the latter half of the last century, must be at- 



^ Mr. Romilly, in the work referred to on page 168, alludes to the strange prevalence ot 

 these congenital deformities of the hands and feet in New Britain. 



