The Mission teachers have long waged war against the practice as a heathen custom, and in most of the coast districts it has fallen into disuse, but in the upper reaches of the Singatoka river, though the people have long been Christians, it still persists, though not universally. Interference with it by a man, albeit a Mission teacher, was evidently considered indecent in itself, for men cannot, without impropriety, concern themselves with so essentially feminine a business. More than one teacher was charged before my court with indecency for having returned to the village to admonish the tattooers while the operation was being performed.
With the introduction of writing it has become common for young men and women to tattoo their names on the forearm or thigh of the person to whom they happen to be attached, and there are comparatively few who do not carry some memento of their heart's history thus ineffaceably recorded. The inconvenience of this custom in a people as fickle as the Fijians does not seem to trouble them.
The keloids, or raised cicatrices, that may still be seen (though the custom is dying out) upon the arms and backs of the women are formed by repeatedly burning the skin with a firebrand, so as to keep the sore open for several weeks. The wart-like excrescences that result are arranged in lines with intervals of about an inch, in half-moons or curves, or in concentric circles. Sometimes they are formed by pinching up the skin, and thrusting a fine splinter through the raised part. They are intended only for ornament, and have no other significance.
The only other interference with Nature is the distension of the ear-lobes in the older men of the hill districts. The ear is first pierced, and gradually distended by the insertion of pieces of wood of increasing size, until the lobe forms a thin cord, like a stout elastic band, and is large enough to receive a reel of cotton, or a circular tin match-box, which are both in favour as ear ornaments. Sometimes the cord breaks, and if the owner has not ceased to care about his personal appearance he will excoriate the broken ends, and splice them with grass fibre until they reunite.
Procuring abortion in the old days appears to have been limited to women of high rank who, for reasons of policy, were not allowed to have children. When it is remembered that every lady of rank who married into another tribe might bear children who, as _vasu_, would have a lien upon every kind of property belonging to their mother's tribe, it is not surprising that means were taken to limit the number of her offspring. In a polygamous society every wife had an interest in preventing her rivals from bearing sons who might dispute the succession with her own offspring, and the chief wife wielded an authority over the inferior wives that enabled her to carry her wishes into effect. Waterhouse mentions that professional abortionists were sent in the train of every lady who married out of the tribe, with instructions to procure the miscarriage of her mistress. The Rev. Walter Lawry, who visited Mbau in 1847, declares, on the authority of all the resident missionaries, that the practice was reduced to a system. But these motives did not operate with the common people, who were seldom in a position to pay the practitioner's fee, although, no doubt, dislike of the long abstinence enjoined during suckling and disinclination to bear children to a man they hated were motives strong enough to induce a few women in every class to rid themselves of their children. The abortionist's craft was then in the hands of a few professional experts, who made too good a thing of their trade to trust their secrets to any but their daughters who were to succeed to their practice.