212 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dead for the oven, while the bad were thrown away. If it was a 

 woman, they ate only the arms and legs. On Mare they devoured all. 

 Their appetite for human flesh was never satisfied. " ' Do you mean 

 to say that you will forbid us the^sA of the sea? Why, these are our 

 fish ! ' This is how they talked when you spoke against cannibalism." 



When white men first landed in Australia the degraded natives re- 

 ceived them with the greatest respect ; they considered them to be the 

 embodied spirits of their own dead. The Australians were, and still 

 are, in the less-known northern parts, habitual cannibals, and always 

 eat their own dead, for fear of wasting good provision. The black 

 bodies being scalded, when being prepared for the oven, became white 

 as the black cuticle came away. Thus, when Europeans first presented 

 themselves to their astonished visions, they simply and reverently re- 

 ceived them as the materialized spirits of their scalded ancestry. 



Among the Indians of America the custom does not ever seem to 

 have been a universal one, although it was general among certain 

 tribes. Schoolcraft relates, in his great work on the " Indian Tribes," 

 that the Sioux will eat the heart of an enemy, and that all the war 

 party will try to get a mouthful, believing, with the Maoris, that they 

 gain courage thereby. Back, too, in his " Arctic Expedition," tells of 

 a Cree Indian who had killed and eaten his wife, daughter, and two 

 sons, and would have killed the youngest, a boy, and fed upon him 

 also, had he not come upon Back's encami^ment. But this can hardly 

 be cited as a case typical of the cannibal instincts of that tribe, as it 

 was only brought about by the direct famine. In Terra del Fuego the 

 otherwise unreasoning natives show a spirit of intelligent economy by 

 always eating, in times of great distress and want, the oldest women 

 of the tribe, as being of much less value than their dogs, which they 

 will not kill until all the grandmothers are consumed. 



But one of the strangest phases of cannibal lore has yet to be 

 touched upon, that, namely, with which all the greatest thaumaturgists 

 and necromancers have been accused from the days of Hadrian, who 

 is known to have sacrificed many young lives in the prosecution of his 

 unholy inquiries, to our own. There is some foundation for this belief 

 in the fact that for some of the deeper and wilder mysteries of the 

 black art an innocent life had to be offered up, from the emanations of 

 whose spilled blood the disembodied spirits of the invoked dead could 

 materialize themselves, and answer the queries of those daring seekers 

 who stopped at nothing to gain their unhallowed ends. It is related 

 that the necromancers of Thessaly added the blood of infants to that 

 of black lambs in their incantatory rites, that the evoked spirits would 

 render themselves objective from the exhalations of the blood. In the 

 present day Hayti is charged with being the home of a secret sect of 

 devil-worshipers, the Voodoos, who practice most mysterious and im- 

 pious solemnities, in which children are killed and offered up, and the 

 bodies eaten by the adepts as part of the awful ceremonial. The Rus- 



