844: Essays. 
epileptic nature afflicted some, both men and women; while a few have lost 
their lives through sunstroke. Sudden deaths were rare. Insanity, mostly 
aberrant, of a mild melancholy type, was occasionally to be found. Anda 
new epidemic disease, of some violent plague-like character, called by them 
rewharewha, and which appeared about forty-five or fifty years ago, destroyed 
nearly three-fifths of the people of the more southern parts of the Northern 
Island ; in some villages and sub-tribes leaving only one or two individuals. 
This name has since been given by the Maoris to the influenza—a 
| disease of much more recent date. 
2. Social. 
10. In their ordinary habits of life they were industrious, regular, 
temperate, and cleanly. They loved society, and dwelt together in or near 
large fenced villages (pa) ; which pa, or forts, before the introduction of 
fire-arms, were always advantageously situated on some eminence, and only 
made with a vast amount of labour. Always early risers, they naturally en- 
joyed their siesta at noon. They had two principal meals a day, at morning 
and evening, which were cooked and eaten hot, and always in the open air, 
the men apart from the women. Fire they obtained by friction; an easy 
though sometimes a troublesome process, often dependent on the material, 
its state, and the skill of the operator. No common (cooking) fire could be 
ever used to kindle one for warming a house, or for sitting by; nor, long after 
the introduction of tobacco, for lighting a pipe. Each fine day brought its 
daily labour to, at least, all the adults .— 
(1.) The men to their cultivations; or to sea-fishing; or to catching 
birds, eels, or rats; or to digging of fern-root; or to climbing the highest 
forest trees for their small fruits; or to the building or repairing of houses, 
canoes, fences, earthworks, and eel weirs ; or to the felling and bringing out 
of trees and split timber from the forest; or to the making of troughs, 
paddles, spades, axes and their handles, spears of various kinds, and other 
offensive implements of stone, bone, and hardwood (some of which required 
years to perfect a single article); or to the manufacture of fishing lines, 
canoe ropes, and small cord; or of nets, of eel traps, of canoe sails, and of 
their prized dog-skin or kiwi-feather clothing mats; or to the making of 
combs and flutes ; or to the making and ornamenting of greenstone, ivory, 
and bone ear-rings and breast ornaments ; or of fish-hooks, circlets for tame 
parrots' legs, various tattooing instruments, and of tags, pins, skewers, and 
needles for their own dress mats, for most of which purposes human bone 
was preferred; or to the seeking for and preparing the various coloured 
mineral pigments, feathers, vegetable and animal oils, and vegetable dyes 
| used as ornament ; or to tattooing, or to th drying and pi ing of human 
* 
