An idea of the serious nature of yaws may be gathered from the cases in which it has been contracted by adult Europeans. Such cases have been numerous enough in Fiji to impress the European settlers with dread and disgust. In most of these cases the disease has permanently shattered the health of the person attacked, its tertiary effects simulating those of neglected syphilis, for, while no less severe, they have proved quite as ineradicable. They are shown in permanent impairment of the digestive functions, emaciation, inflammation of the bones or joints, intractable ulceration, and marked constitutional weakness, thus producing liability to other diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery and pneumonia, and not infrequently ending in death. From this it may be readily imagined that the consequence of yaws to native children can be anything but trivial. With Europeans as well as with natives an attack is more likely to pass off easily when contracted in childhood than when taken in adult life. The most favourable age for getting over it safely seems to be between two and three years. Yaws is communicated by the inoculation of virus from one of its characteristic raspberry-like sores to the abraded surface of the skin of another person. But, though the natives have never discovered this for themselves, they do not, as in other diseases, attempt to explain yaws as the work of a malignant spirit. The fact is that they scarcely believe yaws to be a disease at all. They think that if a child makes a good recovery it becomes more plump and healthy than one who has never had the disease. Mothers are pleased when the first symptoms make their appearance, regarding it as the best thing that could happen to their children to set them on the high road to a vigorous manhood, provided that the disease is not contracted at too early an age. At Mbau, however, the chief women appear always to have recognized the contagious nature of yaws. They say that in former time the children of high rank were not allowed to enter the houses of common people or play with their children, and in consequence of this exclusiveness they seldom contracted yaws until they were of an age to resist its ravages. Thus some escaped it altogether, and the majority had it very mildly. Andi Alisi and Andi Ana are cases in point, so were the late Andi Kuila and Ratu Joseva. Now-a-days there is scarcely an exception to the rule that every Fijian child contracts yaws. Whatever may have been the case formerly, it is now quite common for children to contract the disease while suckling and teething; not infrequently before they can crawl, and even at as early an age as three or four months. When this happens the eruption sometimes recedes prematurely; this is the only danger feared by the natives, who usually attribute the recedence to _ndambe_, _i.e._ incontinence on the part of the parents, or to _ramusu_ (internal injury). When the eruption recedes, as it undoubtedly does in some