progress received such a shock that in some districts the evil effects still linger.

Though the guns and tomahawks were laid aside at a fairly early period, the effects of other evils continued for a longer time. Venereal diseases that were introduced by the crews of the early traders and whalers had their dying fires revived by the soldiers of the “sixties.” I have learned on reputable authority that seventeen Maori women captured by, white troops at the fall of one of the Waikato forts, on their liberation spread the disease amongst their people. The disease died out after working its havoc on the fertility of the race. Any serious recrudescence that might have occurred as the effect of helping to share the “white man's burden” during the Great War has, owing to modern methods and treatment, been arrested.

Epidemic diseases that claimed so many in the past are no longer allowed to go unchecked. The prevention of disease by the organization of a special Department of Health has been of comparatively recent origin amongst the Europeans. In the benefits of such measures the Maori has shared to a material degree. The reorganization of Maori Health Councils, the appointment of Native Health Nurses and Sanitary Inspectors, and the setting-up of a Division of Maori Hygiene in the Department of Health have all had their effect in lowering the heavy mortality due to epidemic diseases. When we consider the mortality atill caused by typhoid fever, we shudder to think of the days when it went unchecked, and tangi after tangi, in lamentation of the dead, spread the scourge from village to village. Medical Officers of Health and Hospital Boards keep a wary eye upon their districts, and the Maori people as a whole no longer accept disease and death with fatal resignation. In the last year or so, in districts where typhoid has occurred, over 2,000 inoculations against the disease have been made. The Tokotoko rangi (“Spear from heaven that sweeps away food and man”), that the ancient poet Turaukawa lamented over, no longer makes thrusts that go unparried.

Sanitation has made great advances. The simple but efficacious form of latrine that Rupe first instituted in the home of the god Rehua in the tenth heaven, copied by succeeding generations in the hill-forte of old, and abandoned with so much of good in the old culture, is being restored in its modern form in a modern environment. Water-supplies are protected, and modern systems installed. Ventilation, which as applied to communal meeting-houses was bitterly opposed twenty years ago, is now treated as a matter of course. Model by-laws are administered by Village Committees acting under the authority of Maori Health Councils. Tangi, hui, and such gatherings are conducted under sanitary rules, and avoid the disasters of the past.

Maori communal life is disintregating. Each generation has added something of European culture, and the old order changes, giving place to new. The thatched house with earthen floor is now, because of its rarity, a thing of ethnological interest. No longer is a group of small huts clustered round a meeting-house typical of a Maori village. Individualization of land and European needs are dispersing the families to their separate holdings. In many places the tribal meeting-house stands alone, or flanked by a solitary cooking-house, patiently waiting until a death or some object of great moment shall for a brief period draw, its people together beneath its sheltering roof. Visiting ethnologists have asked me to take them to some typical Maori village where they would see something of the old Maori life, but I am unable to comply. The time was when I

could send a message to the chief of toe village to assemble his people in the daytime—but not now: they are too busy attending to their farms or labouring to obtain a livelihood, and cannot afford to waste a day. Meetings must be held at night, and sufficient notice must be given to inform the scattered households. Then, when the discussion is over, instead of reclining in their rugs and telling tales of ancient days till dewy morn, they pick up their belongings and depart for their homes, for the coming day has its duties. This is as it should be.

Many people express the opinion that it is a pity that the old Maori haka (war-dances) and poi dances are being lost. In the same breath, they say that the Maori must work his land and live like Europeans. The two are incompatible. The haka and the various dances were the amusements of a people living together and spending their evenings in a communal meeting-house. The Maori is adapting himself to changed circumstances, to a changed environment. The dirge of the lament and the rhythm of the dance will disappear with, the communism that brought them into life. It is a pity from the point of view of sentiment, but sentiment alone will not provide for man's material welfare.

In the changes that have been taking place, the misunderstandings about food and clothing also have gradually been dispersed. Many of the old Maori foods, that were once a necessity, are now prepared only as a luxury on special occasions. European foods, in the orthodox combinations and methods of preparation, are now the ordinary fare of every household. The once universal earth-oven is used only on special occasions. Even at some of the large gatherings, steam generated by traction-engines is used instead of the heated stones of the past. European clothing is now misunderstood by the Maori no more than by the average European.

To see old Maori men of the present day changing into pyjamas ere ensconcing themselves between clean sheets is to realize the significance of the change they have undergone on their not long, if arduous, road of modern progress. All down the changing years the things that appeared impossible to one protesting generation of Maori were advanced a step nearer by the very ones who protested, and made possible for the generation following. The Maori who fought unsuccessfully against European troops in the wars of the “sixties” saw his hopes blighted and his visions of a Maori world crumble into ruins about him. He told von Hochstetter that the Maori would become extinct like the New Zealand fauna, Hochstetter and others believed him. The Maori of the present day, who fought side by side with the descendants of his former enemies on the fields of Gallipoli, France, and Belgium, fought for the honour of a common home and the saving of the new culture which he has adopted as his own. His horizon has expanded, and he realizes even more than a goodly number of the people of England what the British Empire really means. The nightmare visions of the past have been thrown off like a frayed flaxen cloak, and the unfettered Maori of to-day with self-reliance looks confidently forth into the future.

At the time Featherston, von Hochstetter, Newman, and Buller wrote they were probably justified in their doleful outlook. Hill enumerated various proposals, most of which have come to be adopted. The cumulative effects resulting in recovery were not so obvious to Walsh in 1907 as they are now. There was a tendency in the past to attribute the Maori decrease in population to an implied law that all dark-skinned races die out after contact with civilization. The Maori was regarded as inheriting extinction

because it was overwhelming other branches of the Polynesian race to which he belonged. Marett (6) points out that evolution is influenced by race, environment, and culture. He says: “Life evolves—that is to say, changes—by being handed on from certain forms to certain other forms, and a partial rigidity marks the process together with a partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps the life-force, up to a point, true to its old direction, though short of that limit it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then, stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to what point it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell.” It was this stiffening or partial rigidity in the evolutionary process, termed “race,” that was to doom the Maori to extinction. The element of partial plasticity in the evolutionary process has not had sufficient weight attached to it as an avenue of escape for the Maori. It is this “superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor,” that responds to the effects of environment and culture. As the environment has been changing, so the Maori, whilst maintaining his race, has been changing with it. To compare him with the present-day Polynesian of the tropics is unfair to the Polynesian.

Though the Maori is still of the same race, the plastic part of him has been subjected for over five centuries to a changed environment. Five centuries in a temperate climate toughened his constitution, sharpened his mentality, and altered bis material culture. The islanders, with their open houses, scanty tapa clothing, and food without labour, were left far behind the Maori. The sea-roads to Hawaiki were closed down for ever. Warmer houses were built, weaving was invented, the cultivation of the kumara and the taro demanded more onerous care. The working of large forest-trees for buildings and canoes, the excavation of fossed and palisaded forts, and the numerous changed conditions induced by a more vigorous climate, caused him to shed the indolence of the tropics.

A more vigorous and virile people was bred, and when conditions were rudely changed with the nineteenth century the Maori was in a better condition to survive extinction than his more easy-going kinsman in Polynesia. As his material environment has changed in New Zealand, the Maori has strewn the century path with the thousands of his dead; but generation by generation the measure of plasticity has reacted little by little, until now the survivors have weathered the storm of extinction. In like manner the introduced culture has gradually been assimilated through necessity, association, and the teaching of schools. Better housing, regular work, a settled source of income, with regular meals, are resulting in an improved material environment for the family, which in turn provides a better prenatal environment for succeeding generations.

Dr. Rivers (7), in discussing the depopulation of Melanesia, assigns the greatest factor in the nearing extinction of some of these people to a psychological cause in the lack of the incentive to live. We know that the Polynesian can resign himself to die for no organic cause. The Maori in the past has been no exception. We have seen that some of the older generations, after the failure of military and religious attempts to restore the mana and power of the old-time regime, have prophesied early extinction, and had no hope in life. Fortunately, they produced offspring, and the healing hand of time has effaced such destructive pessimism. The Maori has a happy disposition, and his sense of humour has saved him from undue depression. In these days he has his amusements and manly