SOME FACTS AND REFLECTIONS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 202, 25 October 1909, Page 5

SOME FACTS AND REFLECTIONS.

By W, 15. Te Kuiti.

In want of something to read in the train I stood at a bookstall and took up MeClure's for July. Glancing through its leaves. I came upon an article by Burton J. Hendricks, on Cancer, and having a friend in whom this terrible afflict ton has reached the incurable stage; knowing also that all Mr Hendricks advances makes good, I selected that; and the following abstrait condenses what this latest investigation with others, has discovered; together with certain reflections that reading inspired : That cancer each year kills half as many lives as tuberculosis; but where th* latter by segregation and various remedial measures, is on a slight decrease, cancer, despite all the efforts of science, plods doggedly on to an alarming increase. That in England, of all women who have reached the age of 35 years. 1 in every P. and of men. 1 in every 11, die of cancer. That married women are more frequent victims than unmarried, and fertile than barren. That death of cancer is greater in the U.S. of America than elsewhere. That countries where culture, sanitation, stable governments, and all the accessories to modern civilisation are most perfect, there cancer is most prevalent. That not in Africa. Asia, the latin South American States. Russia. Hungary, Italy, nor Spain, but Germany. France, Sweden. Norway. England, all the countries esteemed the most Christian and moral, are the more lamentably afflicted. That, taking the countries by cities, the highest mortality is found, not in slums tthere dirt, vice, and poverty reek -regions where tuberculosis is supposed to breed and disseminata its contagion-but in the wealthy districts its ravage is most violent. That in New York, where Russian Jews. Italians, and the direlicts of many nations congregate in closely packed tenement buildings, and sanitary regulations are Ins. cancer is conspicuously scarce. That in prisons, workhouses, and mental asylums it is rare. Even in the lower creation, all animals subject to man's domination and domesticated by him—but no wild animals—are subject to the disease. That if all fashionable lapdogs were inspected, a very large percentage would be found infected with its incipient germs. To which I may add. that the Maori knew of cancer because he had a name for it: Ngarara. But as he called several tumerous affections Ngarara, c*en that rarity among the race: leprosy, it is difficult to assess a true value to the term; and one can only take the- observations of Europeans with the best opportunity for knowing, by residence, or travel among them, to judge. Of our people numbering over a thousand. I knew of only two ca?es, a male and female, who according to Or Hockstettor's diagnosis suffered from true cancer, the male in the face, and the female the breast. These victims I personally knew: but during many years* travel among . and contact with the race. I saw and heard of only a tew sparsely distributed cases, in tbe days when the Maori was a dense population. Thus I consider the Maori immune from this dreaded whiteman's scourge. Even in his heroic age. when the implacable tohonga assumed the power to inflict it. only one of the highest grade cult, and a set of particularly maligant incantations, might hope to annihilate an enemy with Ngarara. The supreme question these investigations and their deductions now ask is: What do they imply? For every departure in Nature has a definite ending, and every factor a definite pose. Can it be that the aim of the" altruist, the moralist, and the humanist, has been and still is wrong? That where we evade Nature's toll at one gate, she calmly collects at another? That her laws of compensation arc so illimitable that we may not encompass them, and if we attempt to, and partially succeed, she still retains her final grasp of all: Extinction of the species? And that to placate her anger we must find some via media: some compromise, by a search for an altruism mutually agreeable to either? For this inexorable Mother of ours loves her children only so long as they obey her ordainments and is cheerfully soulless to those who transgress them. Some obstinacy she does not object to. but persistent disobedience Never! We may succeed in evading her for a generation or so, she may slacken out rope, but long before tbe rebel comes to the end, she whips it round a stump and brings him up with a jolt of incredible swiftness! It preens oor vanity to feel that we live in an age of high civilisations. We sweep an indicative finger around oor myriad achievements and in complacent pride cry: "Saw ever any past age the like? Wo have made common tbe sacred of sacreds of Nature!" We bawl ourselves hoarse with the platitudes : "progress," "up-to-date," "time by the forelock." and other imbecilities. Bot Nature hears us, and smiles securely, and lets us vaunt, and when she thinks we have exceded our limits, she cries: "Halt! these things you so valiantly prate of are mere pretentious improvement] on unimprovable perfections of a Nature ye do not understand! You arc disordering arrangements I bide my own time to restore. All the friable ironstone you have laboriously changed -into tenuous metal, and fashioned. and tempered, and polished; leave it uncovered outside one night, and )o, in the morning you will see by a thin coating of rust where I have been at my restoration. Ha! and Fudge! for your elever creations!" Such symbolic warnings should help through oor wisdom teeth: should teach us that for every departure from every interference with, and every transgression of her inscrutable orders, she has a countervail of precise retributions. For instance: When she gives us appropriate bead-wear, and we superpose thereon artificial coverings, and keep light and air from it, and rake among its roots with a hard bristly brush, she views us and says: "Good; but if the way I dressed your bead is not good enough. I will take it off, and try baldness!" Again: sbe gave us a fine highly polished white set of grinders to mill our foods with ; but which for aesthetic reasons we

harry with powders and brushes, upon which she nods her head: "At your i games again? Why don't you eat numir.eralised foods, avoid poisonous tea, live the simple life, and cease rasping your teeth with chemicals and brushes; if you do not I will lodge caries where neither your brush, nor the bacterial enemies whom I have appointed to vanquish them, but whom you have destroyed with your mad aesthetic brushing*, can get at them and rot I the beautiful up and nether millstones I gave you!" Further: she has created us dry-land animals, and practically scalelcss. If now we shock our nerve systems with cold water morning tubs, as wc emerge from warm beds, for the agreeable thrill the acquired habit i affords, and not for cleanlinss, at its apologists would have us believe—for every kitchen-maid knows that grease cannot be cleansed with coldwater- -Nature in her callous justice rcmonstraU>3 with us thus: "My bssrbar children lave their hides when the sun is hot, and has taken the chili eff the water. ! But you miserable innovator and cold j tub ist creature, if you will be a fish without a fish's scales I. will make you tpindlc shanked, and blue nosed, and susceptible to cold? and catarrah afflictions, and by covering your hide with scales, make you coarse skinned and horrible to the touch! Dabble in water if you must, but let it tepid; and for land's sake do not make a fetish of your unnatural obsession!'"

Barbarous reflections these, you soy? Stone age and troglcditt? But they are not my invention; they are random gleanings from medical iconoclasts, who ! *.e tficir species more than ensh. linage breakers, who prefer Truth to Pander. Who speak in current literature to a world wide congregation, in a language ungarnished; whether it shock artificial craze conceils, or whether not; if so be tha» the uncultured herd may learn the eternal verities of Nature's Laws. For microscope, and test tube, and synthetic analysis tell no lies. And when their court usher cries: "Silence!" and they deliver their judgments, prudery must listen, or leave tbe Court. So it seems that the "Progress" we belaud with infinite relish, is not progress at all, but a retrogression from standards Nature set man in his more primitive age. Even our sad humanism fails when we pamper and coddle, and permit the wastrels to marry. For nature in her wisdom kills these off by her own methods. She cannot quite prevent them from being planted, but she can weed them out, and does so. This appears harsh and inhuman, but thus it is her pleasure to manage her household. It is not the Individual, it is the Species, her laws are framed to preserve.