42 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
There were persons among them celebrated as 
oculists, but their skill principally consisted in 
removing foreign substances from the eye; and 
when applied to for this purpose, they, as well as 
others, received the payment or fee before they 
commenced their operations; but if the present did 
not please them, they, to satisfy their employers, 
sometimes took one splinter, &c. out of the eye, and 
left another in, that they might be sent for again. 
Their surgeons were remarkably dexterous in 
closing a cut or thrust, by drawing the edges 
carefully together, and applying the pungent juice 
of the ape, arum costatum, to the surface. This, 
acting like caustic, must have caused great pain. 
A fractured limb they set without much trouble ; 
applying splinters of bamboo-cane to the sides, 
and keeping it bound up till healed. A disloca 
tion they usually succeeded in reducing; but the 
other parts of their surgical practice were marked 
by a rude promptness, temerity, and barbarism, 
almost incredible. A man one day fell from a 
tree, and dislocated some part of his neck. His 
companions, on perceiving it, mstantly took him 
up: one of them placed his head between his 
‘own knees, and held it firmly; while the others, 
taking hold of his body, twisted the joint into its 
proper place. 
On another occasion, a number of young men, 
in the district of Fare, were carrying large stones, 
suspended from each end of a pole across their 
shoulders, their usual mode of carrying a burden : 
one of them so injured the vertebre, as to be 
almost unable to move; he had, as they expressed 
it, fatt te tua, broken the back. His fellow-work- 
men laid him flat on his face on the grass; one 
grasped and pulled his shoulders, and the other his 
