[163] Mr. Romilly, in the work referred to on page 168, alludes to the strange prevalence of these congenital deformities of the hands and feet in New Britain.
Strabismus is not uncommon amongst the natives of these islands, and appears to occur with the same relative frequency as amongst more civilised people.
Venereal diseases, both constitutional and local, are said by traders to be very frequent in certain islands, as in Ugi, which have had most intercourse with the outer world. I rarely however came upon unequivocal evidence of the constitutional form of these diseases, those cases which came under my immediate observation being of the non-constitutional types which, as in other tropical regions, are often of a rapidly destructive character. The natives of Ugi assert that these diseases have not been introduced within the memory of any living man, and no tradition prevails with reference to their origin. I shall scarcely enter into the question of the introduction of these diseases into the more central groups of the Pacific, a subject which is discussed in most of the narratives of the early expeditions to those regions, but in a spirit of unfairness and mutual recrimination which goes far to invalidate the conclusions arrived at. Negative evidence, however, must be of a very exhaustive character before it would warrant the inference that to the licence, so freely permitted to the crews of the English and French expeditions during the latter half of the last century, must be attributed the presence of these diseases among the Polynesian races. M. Rollin, who, as surgeon of the frigate “Boussole,” accompanied La Pérouse on his ill-fated voyage, adduces evidence to show the probability of these diseases having existed in the Pacific before the discoveries of the French and English navigators in that region;[164] and La Pérouse himself approaches very near the truth when he suggests that the free intercourse, which prevailed between the natives and the crews during those expeditions, may have increased the activity and destructive tendency of the pre-existing diseases.[165] For, not only has M. Parrot of Paris demonstrated from an examination of the skulls of some South American aborigines the existence of Syphilis in the New World before Columbus set foot on its shores, but he affirms without hesitation, after examining three fragments of infant skulls from a dolmen in central France, that this disease existed in prehistoric times (“Lancet,” May 10th, 1879). We are not therefore surprised at finding references to venereal diseases in the ancient literature of China, India, Arabia, Greece and Rome (Aitken’s “Medicine,” 6th edit, 1872, vol i. p. 859); and having regard to the ethnological past of the Pacific, we can with some confidence assume that the original stock, derived in the first place from the Asiatic continent, brought with them these diseases.