It was hoped that the Travelling European Inspectors appointed in 1898 to go from village to village enforcing the Native Regulations might initiate a few prosecutions, and so
frighten the professional abortionist, who now practises with complete impunity, for as soon as the people have an object-lesson of the risk she is running in her nefarious occupation, a quarrel among the women of the village will bring forward informers to denounce her. But, since no legal penalty has ever succeeded in stamping out a practice that is secretly approved by the popular conscience, all that can be hoped for is a slight decrease in the stillbirth-rate.
FOOTNOTES:
[83] Medical Jurisprudence.
CHAPTER XIV
THE INSOUCIANCE OF NATIVE RACES
If we were called upon to name the one invention that stands between savagery and the growth of civilization we might fairly choose the timepiece of sundial. Fixed routine in daily life is unknown to primitive man, whose functions are controlled only by the impulse of the moment. Even among civilized races the most stagnant are those who have never learnt to put a value upon time, and who, like the Spanish, give an honourable place in their vocabulary to the word mañana, or its equivalent. Few, if any, of the natural races have made any provision in their vocabulary for any division of time less than the day; they have no word for hour, minute, or second, nor would they have any for day, if Nature had not divided the one from the other by intervals of darkness. Only three divisions of time were known to the Fijians: the year (yambaki), so named from the heathen harvest home (mbaki); the lunar month (vula); and the day (singa). He identifies any greater divisions of time by naming the reigning chief of the period, or by saying, "When so-and-so was so high," indicating some aged man in the party and marking his height at the time of the occurrence in the air with the hand. He will indicate the time of an event in the immediate past or future by the yam crop—"When the yams are ripe," or "At last planting time"; about the remote future he never troubles himself.
FIJIANS ABHOR PUNCTUALITY