494 Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
made statements chiefly consisting of vague and shadowy beliefs, and not 
the results of patient enquiries. Upwards of forty years have come and 
gone since this colony was founded, and since 1874 the censuses have been 
so many and so accurate, and the population so large, as to afford us a suf- 
ficient supply of facts whereon to base the statements made by us. In the 
childhood of the colony several army surgeons collected statistics of the 
healthiness of the troops stationed in it, and compared these with those of 
our soldiers quartered in other parts of the globe. These statistics, though 
few, pointed strongly to the fact that the climate of New Zealand was good. 
In conjunction with my friend Mr. Frankland I proposed to examine 
carefully what were the grounds on which this belief was based. We 
agreed to contribute a joint paper. Subsequently this plan was slightly 
changed, but the statistics in this paper were all supplied by him, and of 
their accuracy there can be no question. Mr. Frankland’s great mathe- 
matical powers and his long and thorough acquaintance with the vital 
statisties of the colony are an absolute guarantee of their correctness. 
Any physician investigating the question whether this colony is or is 
not healthy, would make search for diseases, old and new; for diseases 
well known to him and for diseases hitherto unrecognized. He would 
draw up a list of prevalent diseases, just as a botanist or geologist would 
prepare lists of plants and rocks. 
Subjoined is a list (No. I.) of diseases known to exist in this colony and 
another (No. II.) of diseases not yet imported, whilst the last list (No. III.) 
shows the list of diseases peculiar to these islands. Though I have taken 
great pains and made many enquiries for the purposes of making these lists 
as accurate as possible, it must be remembered that no such lists as the 
first two can be perfect. Of one thing we are certain, viz., that all the 
diseases named in No. I. have actually obtained in New Zealand. It is 
possible that a few in No. II. may also have existed. These lists are com- 
piled from various sources. The Registrar-Generals returns are valuable 
only for diseases which kill ; they take no heed of the others. 
An examination of these lists shows us that people coming to this colony 
have no need to fear that they run a risk of catching new diseases, for the 
only indigenous diseases are the bite of the katipo, and very rare deaths 
from the eating of two or three different kinds of poisonous berries. From. 
the Maoris, the original inhabitants, we have not acquired one single disease. 
They have not one new disease of their own. Earlier writers on the colony 
talk of a disease called ngerengere, but this is merely a variety of pure 
leprosy, which is common to all the Polynesian inhabitants of the Pacific - 
isles. It presents no feature worthy of notice, except that it is fast disap- 
pearing, and is far less common now than it was forty years ago. Probably 
