ABSTRACT
The maintenance of physical fitness was recognized as a personal and national obligation. The denial of any normal healthy bodily appetite for the mere sake of denial was quite foreign to his ideas. Although the New Zealand Maori took the utmost pride in his body and directed all his endeavours towards improving it and preserving his health and efficiency, his ambition was not so much to live to be fit as to be fit to live. For over a century European travellers, scientists, missionaries, and residents have watched Maori dance-exercises, without in any way realizing that they constituted a rational and ordered system of body-building and personal hygiene, as well as a systematic plan of race culture. The immediate object in warfare, according to Maori principles, was to make captives. Food was regarded not only as the body's natural sustenance but also as a natural corrective.
