514 THE BENEFIT OF MISSIONS. 



wretched women, who are eaten by their own relatives. Dumont- 

 d'Urville speaks of a chief, named Tanoa, who, for a public banquet, 

 caused thirty women to be slain, and their kin, far from murmuring 

 or lamenting, took part in the hideous feast. 



In Africa, Captain Burton saw, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, 

 a cannibal people, named the Vouabembes, who feed upon carrion, 

 vermin, larvse, and insects, and carry their sluggishness and brutality 

 to such an extreme as to eat raw and putrid human flesh. Although 

 you may see on every countenance, says this adventurous traveller,* 

 the expression of chronic hunger, the poor wretches, timid, fuliginous, 

 stunted, degraded, seem far more dangerous enemies to the dead than 

 to the living. 



Owing to the exertions of our missionaries, this horrible practice, 

 against which our better nature instinctively rebels, is rapidly dying 

 out in every region where their beneficial influence extends. In 

 Polynesia and New Zealand, for instance, cannibalism is almost 

 extinct. And if we owed no other service to the self-denying exer- 

 tions of the soldiers of the Cross, this alone would entitle them to 

 our gratitude, for the extermination of anthropophagy is the first step 

 towards teaching man to reverence man. 



CHAPTER X. 



MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS THE SAVAGE RACES 



THE NEGROES. 



" When wild in woods the untutored savage ran." 



SAVAGERY is evidently the primitive condition of man. But while 

 for certain races it has only been the first period of a more or less 

 rapid progressive evolution, a movement in advance more or less com- 

 plete, for others it seems to be a perpetual infancy, an incurable 

 * Capt. R. F. Burton, " Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa. ' 



