An infusion called _wai-ni-lutu-vata_ (medicine for simultaneous birth) is sometimes taken during the later months of pregnancy, to induce an easy labour and the descent of the placenta at the proper moment. Among the hill tribes of Vitilevu labour seems to be more easy and expeditious than on the coast, and yet, notwithstanding their less varied experience, the midwives of those tribes enjoy a higher reputation for skill, and also follow more orthodox methods than their sisters among the more enlightened tribes. Both, however, display the same ignorance of the rudiments of physiology, and are as empirical in their midwifery as in their treatment of ordinary sickness. The infant mortality is attributed by many Europeans to the hard work done by the women during pregnancy, and immediately after childbirth. The native belief is that a woman should do no heavy work up to the time of quickening, but that thenceforward the more she works the easier will her confinement be. Though this maxim is universal, the practice during pregnancy varies with the individual and the locality. Among the hill tribes women leave their house as early as the day after their confinement; they generally do so about the fifth day. Cases are recorded in which a woman has gone out in the morning in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and has returned in the evening with a load of firewood on her back and a new-born child in her arms. But at Mbau, and among the higher classes generally, women are kept to the house for a full month, and among the high chiefs the _bongi ndrau_ (hundred days) are observed, the mother abstaining from all but purely domestic occupations for that period. Accidents of childbirth seem to be rare with Fijian women. All the midwives that have been questioned agree that mal-presentations are uncommon, and that only one case of an arm-presentation had occurred within their experience. When abnormal presentations do occur they are regarded as being the fruit of an adulterous connection, and when the child dies, as it invariably does, the death is put down to this cause instead of to want of skill on the part of the midwife. The Vital Statistics put the still births at 6 per cent., and in a few provinces at 10 per cent., but it has been ascertained that many of these represent cases of foetal death before delivery.