H.—3]

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sions will be dispelled, from the clouds they will fall to earth again and take up the struggle for existence two generations in arrear of the other tribes. However, some have been won over, such as the Ngatihinc, of Pariroa and Whenuakura, and the Ngatimaru, of the Upper Waitara. Parihaka, the headquarters of Te Whiti and Tohu, and probably the largest pa in New Zealand, is quite a small town. Fine wooden buildings continue to rise, and it is their boast that soon there will be no rush or toetoe houses at all. There is a good water-supply, conducted to the houses by pipes. The village is kept in good order. At Mokau, where the damp unhealthy site of the village was condemned, the Natives have selected a more healthy site where they intend to build. Health. There has been a great deal of sickness in the Taranaki district about Rahotu, and between New Plymouth and Waitara, as well as at Raetihi in the Wanganui district. Abdominal complaints, due to bad feeding, have been very prevalent amongst young children, and at Mokau led to a panic of typhoid. Chest-troubles, due to bad hygiene and improper clothing, are also common. After seeing young children and girls clothed in many cases with simply one thin print garment on, the wonder is that so many survive. There are many cases of phthisis along the coast, and great care has been taken in teaching parents the value of open-air treatment and disinfection of sputum. Phthisis is not so common as one would expect from the Maori habit of crowding into badly ventilated buildings, and the fact that they offer virgin soil to the tubercle bacillus. Tubercular bone-disease and tubercular glands form a higher percentage of the diseases, while otitis media is common among the young. After obtaining the correct census returns I hope to be able to give statistics. The leper up the Wanganui River is isolated as well as possible until the leper island is forthcoming. His hands and feet are now healed. There were cases of typhoid at Pukerua and Bell Block. Mortality. The mortality in many parts is in excess of the birth-rate. This I attribute to the Maori not having been able to overtake and assimilate himself to the altered conditions of life. The gap between the Stone Age and the age of electricity and radium has been too wide to bridge in less than a century. Some of the younger generation imagine that except in the matter of pigment they are pakehas, the elders that they preserve pure and undefiled the traditions of the ancient Maori, but the main mass of the people are in a transitional state, neither the one nor the other. The energy and spirit of the hunter and warrior are disappearing. Even the sanitary laws of the old fighting-pas are lost, so that the reintroduction of some of them is regarded as a foreign innovation. The incantations which cured by suggestion the ailments caused by suggestion have no antitoxic power against civilised bacteria. The old gregarious instinct which kept the hapus and tribes together was their safeguard in the days of war, but now impedes progress, nay, even threatens the life of the race in the days of peace and intellect. The communism of the past meant industry, training in arms, good physique, the keeping of the law, the sharing of the tribal burden, and the preservation of life. It was a factor in the evolution of race. The communism of to-day means indolence, sloth, decay of racial vigour, the crushing of individual effort, the spreading of introduced infectious diseases, and the many evils that are petrifying the Maori and preventing his advance. It has outlived its use, and its continuance spells degeneration. T agree with Dr. Pomare that the time has come for the substitution of individual effort in its place. The Maori communistic system is based on their manner of holding property. With the individualisation of Maori lands, communism and its evils will disappear. When each man has his own holding and has to depend upon his own efforts to provide home, food, and clothing for his wife and family, he will have an incentive to work, and necessity will teach him to improve and advance. Then insanitary dwellings, insufficient clothing, irregular meals, improper food, and bodies weakened by idleness, will cease to loom so largely in the causation of disease. This must be backed up by a system of education in which due proportion will be given to those branches which will be of most use to the greatest number, or, as Herbert Spencer puts it, " prepare them for complete living." The Maoris have been endowed by Nature with a megacephalic brain. They possess to a high degree the power of imitation. Circumstances have short-circuited them from the main current where the evolution of mind went on more rapidly. Famine, calamity, and war, the grim teachers of the past, can now be dispensed with. Intelligent legislation taking the place of nature can now bring the Maori rapidly through his three thousand years of arrears in time into the full blaze of the twentieth century, and enable him to take his stand on terms of equality with the white man as a fellow-citizen in what the late Mr. Seddon termed " God's own country." That many will go to the wall we cannot deny. They have done so from the beginning of time, and no legislation can abolish the laws of Nature. It can, however, temper the wind to the shorn lamb, and protect the Maori from himself and his land-hungering white neighbour until he has approached a little nearer to the latter's knowledge. It can help him a little more before abandoning him in the struggle for existence to bear the attack of the accumulated experience of centuries of European mental progress. It is only that these matters are at the root of the question and have a direct bearing not only upon the health of individuals, but upon the existence of the race, that I have been tempted from the beaten way of health reports. Suggestions. The Maoris suffer as much from ignorance of nursing as they do from lack of right remedies. The need for Native district nurses is almost as great as that of medical officers. The Natives have a strong prejudice against European hospitals. Behind the barriers of the hospital-wards and behind the barrier of speech they know not what is going on. Therefore they imagine. The result is that the