received into the system at birth, one would have to suppose that it had remained latent for thirty, forty, or even seventy years, a circumstance without parallel in pathology. In one respect, however, leprosy, like tubercle, is hereditary; that is to say, it often shows a preference for the members of a single family, whose constitutions have some predisposing family characteristic, and who are living together, breathing the same air, and eating the same food. [Pageheader: LEPROSY NOT HEREDITARY] The opinion of students of the disease is now almost universal--that leprosy is communicated by contagion, and by contagion alone, though it has not yet been determined how the contagion is communicated. Very few of the nurses and doctors in leper asylums acquire the disease, and, except in one doubtful instance, every attempt to inoculate man and the lower animals with the _Bacillus lepræ_ has failed. It may be that the leper-germ is sterile except in certain phases of the disease, and that only in favourable conditions in the recipient's health, combined with intimate contact with the leper, can the disease take hold. Modern opinion, therefore, holds that leprosy is contagious, and, in a sense, hereditary also in so far as it tends to cling about certain families whose members show a constitutional readiness to receive it. I have dwelt upon this opinion at some length in order to show that this is precisely the view which the Fijians themselves take of the disease. A man is said to come of a _kawa ni vukavuka_ (leprosy-stock), which implies no disgrace except among the highest families, and if he develops the disease his misfortune is regarded as one of the family traits as inevitable as the shape of his nose. At the same time he is believed to have the power of infecting others (not necessarily by actual contagion), and he was generally made to live alone or with other lepers, at a distance from the village. In Tonga the contagious nature of leprosy was fully recognized, and the lepers were isolated on separate islets or uninhabited parts of the larger islands. It is there a grave breach of good manners to apply the word leprosy (_kilia_) to any one in polite society, and many ingenious shifts are resorted to in order to express the meaning without using the word. In the session of the native parliament of 1891, when a member of the upper house was discovered to be suffering from the disease, and a resolution to assign an island to him as asylum was passed, I covered myself with shame by unwittingly pronouncing the forbidden word after other speakers had been skirmishing round it for fully half-an-hour after this fashion--"Havea's friends were pining for him at home, and therefore it was but right that he should be excused further attendance at the house; nay, more, to the westward lay many delightful little islands which Havea was longing to visit, where his every wish would be gratified, and where--well--the