Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/20

10 deviennent crochus et semblent brisés; la peau se déchire et s'ouvre en larges plaies; les os, comme moulus, se bri- sent en morceaux et tombent en poussiere; et, se dissolvant ainsi, peu à peu, les mains, les pieds, le nez, les yeux tirés, ils deviennent monstreux, et meurent, généralement au bout de cinq ou six années, dans un état horrible mais sans souffrir." Here is then an excellent description of leprosy; yet apparently M. Moerenhout was not aware that Hobi was the same disease, and ventures no suggestion as to its identity with any European affection, and never refers to leprosy by name beyond the meagre, almost parenthetical, allusion already quoted from page 155.

In Hawaii it has been held that leprosy was first introduced into the islands of the group as lately as the year 1843 from China; and although many circumstances connected with leprosy in the kindred races of other Polynesian archipelagos render it most probable that that supposition is at variance with fact, still the written and printed accounts of the Hawaiian islands and their people before that time have failed, it would seem, to establish the contrary; and the allusions to leprosy in the early literature relating to them are as cursory and inept, and as much jumbled together with syphilis and struma, as elsewhere.

Failing to gather from such scanty measure of European literature as is at hand in the colony any consistent account of leprosy in the natives in bygone times, one may be forgiven for turning to such sources of native tradition and mythology as are available.

In this, Maori traditions are very much to the point, and at once carry us back half a dozen centuries or so, if not farther. They describe with more or less minuteness the immigrations of the Maori to New Zealand. They point, like the traditions of almost every other Polynesian nation, to Hawaiki as the land from which they originally came; and