Newman.— 0% (Janses leading to the Extinction of the Maori. 'ill 



Wars during the past thirty or forty years have destroyed a number of 

 Maoris, but though they lost, in their wars with us, many on the battle-field, 

 and very many more by semi- starvation leading to lowered vitality, and 

 others from diseases arising out of the hardships they endured, yet these 

 wars were neither so long nor so frequent, nor so sanguinary as their former 

 incessant intertribal strifes. Moreover, when we took any Maori prisoners, 

 we lodged and fed them well — only we did not slay and eat them afterwards 

 as was the former custom of the country. 



Many writers assert that horses have been a not unimportant factor, in 

 two ways (1) directly by falls, which either killed outright or after a time ; 

 (2) by making locomotion so easy as to induce the natives to be always 

 travelling long distances, thus carrying diseases far and wide : this easy 

 travelhng also induced them (by opening wider their range of pleasure) to 

 neglect necessary work in their fields ; it also led to all the evils that spring 

 from clothes wetted on their- long journeys and worn till dry. 



Natives whose limbs are severely crushed by machinery, in battle, or by 

 other accidents, not infrequently die because they refuse to submit to ampu- 

 tation. 



Mental depression is held by many authorities to have a large effect 

 upon the Maoris, and certainly the loss of their former cropping grounds, of 

 their sacred burial grounds, of the rivers and lakes wherein they formerly 

 fished ; and the evident decrease of their race does probably affect a few, 

 but most assuredly only a very few. A want of courage, however, in 

 another direction does influence the death-rate : namely, the readiness with 

 which they " throw up the sponge " when attacked by disease. Unquestion- 

 ably many Maoris die of slight ailments because when attacked they do not 

 fight against the disease and strive to resist its ravages, but quietly coil their 

 blankets round them, and lie down passively to die. They seem to have no 

 pluck, and their friends look on in a listless do-nothing way, accepting their 

 fate needlessly. 



Sterility. 



Though the adult Maori death-rate is greatly in excess of that of the 

 whites, yet the excess is not so much in excess as to lead to the rapid 

 decrease of the race were it not that the race is so infertile and its children 

 die with such frightful frequency. The Maori race is singularly infertile. 

 This infertility is common to the people in almost all Polynesia. Wallace 

 asserts that the Dyaks are fast dying out, even in places where Europeans 

 have but little intruded, and that the infertility of the women there is very 

 marked, the number of births to each woman being extremely few. De 

 Quatrefages quotes similar statements. In the Marquesas, at Taio Hae, 

 M. Jouan saw the population fall, in three years, from 400 to 250, during 



