142 A MISSION TO VITI. 
mile across, and full of fruit-trees. It was pointed out 
as the spot where, only a twelvemonth ago, a man was 
baked and eaten. Cannibalism in Fiji will soon num- 
ber amongst the things that have been. The influence 
of all the whites residing in or visiting the group is 
steadily directed towards its extinction, and though a 
person who ought to have had more charity has asserted 
in print that he had been told some of the white resi- 
dents were habitual partakers of human flesh, I think, 
for the honour of our race, such second-hand stories 
ought to be indignantly rejected. Antiquaries know 
that cannibalism of a certain form lingered in Europe 
long after the Reformation; that mummies, said to be 
Egyptian, were extensively used medicinally, and that 
only after it was found out patients had not partaken 
of the contemporaries of Thothmes I. or Rameses the 
Great, but of bituminized portions of their own fellow- 
countrymen, this precious quack medicine fell into abso- 
lute disuse. Even in our own times we may still meet 
in certain parts of Europe people doing what has been 
recorded with horror of the Fijians—that of drinking 
the living blood of man; but mark! with this essential 
difference, that the former, watching their opportunities 
at public executions, do it in hopes of thereby curing 
fits of epilepsy, whilst the latter did it to gratify re- 
venge and exult over fallen enemies. As for a Euro- 
pean, even of the lowest grade, coolly sitting down to a 
regular cannibal feast, the idea is too preposterous to 
have ever been allowed to disgrace the pages of a mo- 
dern publication. 
Taudromu, another of the islands of Ga loa Bay, 
