The analogy of the custom with the
old English practice of bringing scrofulous patients to the king to
be healed by his touch is sufficiently obvious, and suggests, as I
have already pointed out elsewhere, that among our own remote
ancestors scrofula may have obtained its name of the King's Evil,
from a belief, like that of the Tongans, that it was caused as well
as cured by contact with the divine majesty of kings.
In New Zealand the dread of the sanctity of chiefs was at least as
great as in Tonga. Their ghostly power, derived from an ancestral
spirit, diffused itself by contagion over everything they touched,
and could strike dead all who rashly or unwittingly meddled with it.
For instance, it once happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank
and great sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the
wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief
had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking
questions. Hardly had he finished when he was informed by a
horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had eaten was
the chief's.
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