Newman. — On Causes leading to the Extinction of the Maori. 467 



seem to prefer doing. Amongst ourselves the awful ravages of phtliisis may 

 be either entirely checked or greatly abated, by care, by medicine, by nurs- 

 ing, and by change of chmate ; of all these the Maori knows nothing. He 

 undergoes no medical treatment at all, or only in the last stages, when 

 medicine is powerless ; he never takes care of himself, he goes out in aU 

 weathers, gets soaked and does not change his clothes, and his food is not 

 the well-cooked, wholesome, easily digestible food fit for an invalid ; he 

 never wears suitable warm clothing. This frightful scourge (phthisis) is 

 still further aggravated by the close fetid air of their tiny lohares, or the 

 draughty condition of then- badly made wooden houses. Again, as so many 

 persons, healthy as well as unhealthy in all stages, sleep all huddled close 

 together in their unventilated ivhares, they breathe and rebreathe each 

 others unhealthy breaths. The consequence is that the naturally healthy 

 catch the disease in large numbers. Amongst ourselves who have private 

 sleeping rooms, we see the ill effects, but among the Maoris the results are 

 awful to contemplate. 



This evil habit of pitching their dwellings on low-lying swampy ground 

 causes many deaths from rheumatism, from bronchitis, pneumonia, and 

 low fever. 



I wrote to a number of medical men to obtain their experience, and to 

 them I am exceedingly grateful for much most useful information. Unfor- 

 tunately the Maoris need not have their deaths certified to, and in a large 

 class of diseases, especially those of women, they never consult a doctor. 

 Owing to these causes I am unable to present to this society any statistics 

 of disease ; but still it is not difficult to detect the chief. The principal 

 diseases of infants are scrofulous ; large numbers die from scrofula in some 

 shape or another. From the time they are weaned they eat anything the 

 mother eats, and the consequence is that most Maori children look badly 

 fed, big-bellied, with wasted limbs, and with eruptions about their orifices. 

 They die largely from the effects of bad feeding, getting tabes mesenterica, 

 chronic diarrhoea, atrophy. They suffer from swollen glands and ecze- 

 matous eruptions. Some have hydrocephalus, acute and chronic. Dr. 

 Spencer, who has for many years attended a Maori orphanage, says they 

 improve wonderfully on admission ; then- bellies shrink ; their Hmbs grow 

 bigger, and their eruptions vanish ; but about puberty they often get weak 

 again and break out afresh with eruption. They are very subject to 

 chronic peratitis. 



Dr. Earle of Wanganui dilates on the many hundreds of children that 

 die annually from dysentery and tabes mesenterica, brought on by improper 

 food and the want of a milk diet. With regard to a milk diet, Mr. Locke 

 writes that in those instances where the children are fed on milk they im- 



