472 



Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



which time only three or four births were registered. In the Sandwich 

 Islands, from among eighty married women, M. Delapelin found that 

 only thirty-nine had children. There were only nineteen children in the 

 twenty principal families of chiefs, and in the same islands, in 1849, the 

 official statistics of M. Kenny gave 4,520 deaths to only 1,422 births. The 

 Kanakas, though separated by so many thousands of miles of water, are singu- 

 larly like the Maoris in appearance, language, and mythology: therefore it is 

 not a little strange to find among them sterility like that which exists among 

 the Maoris. Nearly all the persons knowing the Maoris well whom I have 

 happened to consult, are agreed on this point, viz., that many women are 

 absolutely sterile, and that the others are only moderately fertile, having 

 only one, two, or three children. The Maoris themselves recognize the fact 

 but can assign no cause. Colenso says that children are becoming fewer 

 every year, and that of the seven principal chiefs in Ahuriri, all but one was 

 childless, and of the one who had four sons three were fruitless. Judge 

 Fenton gives some remarkable statistics in his " Observations on the State 

 of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of New Zealand, 1859." In certain well-known 

 tribes in the Waikato, between the years 1844 to 1858, there were : Deaths, 

 650 ; births, 320. He gives the following striking table of results : — 









ED 



4 



i 



d 

 ■=3 



C3 

 O 



c3 



u 

 ^ 



44 





g) 



1 



|3 



^ 

 1 











|2i 























QD 



6B 



DD 



tiD 



<D 



CD 



fcO 



M 



IZ 



^ 



^ 



'A 



H 



;z; 



\^ 



55 



Number of wives whose issue are nowl 

 living. J 



Number of wives whose issue are dead . 

 Number of barren wives . . 



46 



8 



22 



14 



32 



31 



107 



15 



19 



2 



3 



4 



10 



11 



38 



2 



24 



5 



11 



9 



15 



8 



75 



7 



221 



68 



154 



Farther on in this book he estimates that the ratio of barren to 

 productive Maori women is as 1 to 2-86. To account for this startling 

 infertility many theories have been invented, but it is more than certain 

 that the great bulk of them are imaginary and baseless. Doubtless this 

 infertility arises from many causes, and not a single cause. I beheve 

 that the chief source of this evil is interbreeding ; that the Maoris 

 have almost always married in their oxen or in some nearly adjacent tribe. 

 Nearly aU the pure races of men and animals are infertile, as compared 

 with the mongrels. Any reference to Darwin's " Plants and Animals under 

 Domestication," or his later work detailing his researches into the crossing 

 and fertility of plants, will save the need of cumbering these pages with 

 overwhelming proof of the need of crossing to maintain the fertility of 



