As there is, perhaps, no source of disease, either critical or chronic, but intemperance and inactivity, it cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowded about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers that we have seen naked did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had left behind. At first, indeed, observing that some of them when they came off to us were marked in patches with a white flowery appearance upon different parts of their bodies, we thought that they were leprous, or highly scorbutic; but upon examination we found that these marks were owing to their having been wetted by the spray of the sea in their passage, which, when it was dried away, left the salts behind it in a fine white powder. Another proof of health, which we have mentioned upon a former occasion, is the facility with which the wounds healed that had left scars behind them, and that we saw in a recent state; when we saw the man who had been shot with a musket-ball through the fleshy part of his arm, his wound seemed to be so well digested, and in so fair a way of being perfectly healed, that if I had not known no application had been made to it, I should certainly have enquired, with a very interested curiosity, after the vulnerary herbs and surgical art of the country. A farther proof that human nature is here untainted with disease, is the great number of old men that we saw, many of whom, by the loss of their hair and teeth, appeared to be very ancient, yet none of them were decrepit; and though not equal to the young in muscular strength, were not a whit behind them in cheerfulness and vivacity. CHAP. X. OF THE CANOES AND NAVIGATION OF THE INHABITANTS OF NEW ZEALAND: THEIR TILLAGE, WEAPONS, AND MUSIC: GOVERNMENT, RELIGION, AND LANGUAGE: WITH SOME REASONS AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF A SOUTHERN CONTINENT.