If the other Polynesian groups had been virgin soil the crop of lepers should have been no less fruitful. Among the Maoris, with whom it was formerly common, it has now died out. Their traditions relate that among the immigrants who arrived from Hawaiki in the canoe _Tuwhenua_ there was a leper who infected all his companions. They landed at Te Waka Tuwhenua (Cape Rodney), a little to the south of Whangarei, and scattered among the immigrants of the Tainui and Ngapuhi parties. Leprosy is still called Tuwhenua in the Whangarei district, but whether the disease was called after the canoe, or the canoe after the disease, it is difficult now to determine. In other districts it is called Puhipuhi and Ngerengere. [Pageheader: LEPROSY IN ANCIENT TIMES] The fact that leprosy was endemic among some branches of the Malayo-Polynesian stock would be another argument, if any other were needed, for tracing it to a Western rather than an American origin, for we may infer from the silence of the Spanish historians, that leprosy was unknown among the aborigines of the American continent. The primitive home of the disease was Asia and North Africa, and there is negative evidence that it was introduced into Europe somewhere between 400 and 345 b.c., in the fact that Hippocrates barely mentions the subject, and that Aristotle is the first to give an unequivocal description of the disease. On the other hand, the frequent allusions in the oldest Chinese, Syrian and Egyptian writings to a disease bearing all the marked characteristics of leprosy, seem to show that it was as common in the East in times of remote antiquity as it is at the present day. The Roman conquests carried it far and wide through Europe, until it became so terrible a scourge that nearly all the European states of the Middle Ages were driven to enact stringent laws for the segregation of lepers, which so far fulfilled their object that after the fourteenth century, when leprosy had touched its culminating point, it began to decline. The last British leper died in Shetland in 1798, and, though indigenous lepers are still occasionally met with in most of the countries of Southern Europe, the disease is extinct in all the northern states except Norway, where there were still 11,000 known lepers in 1890.