2o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



they became incurable ; and the Issedones did the same, resembling, 

 in this particular, the Tupis of Brazil, who, when the paje (chief) de- 

 s]Daired of a man's recovery to health, killed and ate the invalid — a 

 rough-and-ready method of proving that their respected chief and 

 medicine-man could not be mistaken in his diagnosis of the case. 



Our own hero-king, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, is said to have eaten 

 human flesh during the Crusades ; the popular belief of the time be- 

 ing that the cooked head of a Saracen had restored him to strength 

 and activity from a bed of sickness. A verse of a contemporary ballad 



records this : 



" King Richard shall warrant 

 There is no flesh so nourissant 

 Unto an Englishman, 

 Partridge, plover, heron, ne swan, 

 Cow ne ox, sheep ne swine, 

 As the head of a Sarazyne." 



The probable causes for this strange variation from normal appe- 

 tite are more numerous than would be supposed. Famine and the 

 consequent insistent demands of hunger are the likeliest primary 

 causes of this as well as of most things — the necessity for food being 

 the first and most urgent incentive to action of all sorts. Modern 

 stories of shipwreck, when the survivors have taken to the boats and 

 all food is gone, or of travel in the barren wastes of Australia, show 

 how naturally this means of prolonging life suggests itself to the 

 minds of men ravenous with hunger, and from whom the thin cloak 

 of civilization, with which we all hide the natural animal, has fallen 

 away. 



Enmity, hatred, and revenge are also excelleiit reasons for the 

 origin of cannibalism, which would be almost as likely as hunger to 

 have suggested it, as famine is not a constant factor in savage life, 

 and we are led to suppose that hostility and rancor are. What more 

 satisfactory method for the expression of detestation and contempt 

 can be imagined, than that one should cook and calmly eat an enemy 

 when one has slain him ? The thing is then complete, finis coronat 

 opus, the termination rounds and finishes the deed to a perfect whole ; 

 without this climax it were but half accomplished and entirely unsatis- 

 factory. The happy and peaceful mind and the satisfied and replete 

 body of a savage who has killed and cooked his foe, and eaten him, 

 can easily be imagined, and they present a pleasant picture to the 

 mind that is marred by no sense of incompleteness. 



In many places, however, where food was plentiful, and where the 

 people were otherwise amiable and gentle, and far advanced toward 

 an admirable civilization — for instance, Mexico and Peru before the 

 Spanish conquest — this custom of cannibalism prevailed, and to an ex- 

 tent that necessitated frequent wars for the jDroviding of the requisite 

 victims. Here the cause was of a more complex nature than the sim- 



