This stone possessed a power of conferring leprosy upon any person on whom the spell might be worked. It is by no means clear to what extent its proprietors were able, or supposed to be able, to exercise their volition in the matter; but the medium by which the thing was said to be effected was an act of contact. It was not necessary that the doomed person's body should touch Katalewe. It was enough if a person who bore a grudge could obtain possession of his intended victim's masi, or of some scraps of his food-refuse or other rejected rubbish, and by the medium of the proprietor of the stone—Taukei ni vatu—it was placed on or against it. The owner of the article would thereafter develop leprosy. This was the usual mode by which Katalewe was believed to operate; but the practice varies somewhat curiously in different parts of Navitilevu and with different stones. So potent, indeed, was this one, that the creeping stems of the couch-grass and the runners of any little creeper or plant which grew hard by invariably withered and died off, or else turned aside so soon as their extremities reached to within a space equal to eighteen or twenty inches of the stone. Over a patch of ground as large as a sponge-bath, therefore, of which Katalewe was the centre, the sur-
marked, extensive, and partly anæsthetic macula on the right thigh. She was treated for leprosy by a native woman of Bureitu, since dead, and drank medicine and observed tabus off and on for some years. By the time she was old enough to marry, the disease had ceased to make any advance, the stumps of the toes had quite healed, she could walk without a halt, and the skin where the macula was showed signs of regaining its natural pigmentation. After marriage she never noticed any further signs of leprosy.
At present there is a macula on the right thigh several inches in extent, but sensation is perfect over it; and the foot appears entirely sound except that the three toes are wanting. She avers that the cause of the disease in her case was heredity, and does not believe it was contagion; and she says that she certainly would have died of it if she had not come under special treatment. She has two children living, the elder about nine years of age. Both were seen, and found to be free from leprosy to all appearances, and otherwise in good health.
