344 Essays. 



epileptic nature afflicted some, botli men and women ; Avliile a few have lost 

 their lives through sunstroke. Sudden deaths were rare. Insanity, mostly 

 aberrant, of a mild melancholy type, Avas occasionally to be found. And a 

 new epidemic disease, of some violent plague-like character, called by them 

 rewliareioTia, 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. Eire 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 meii 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 the drying and preserving of human 



