44 ANIMAL FOOD RESOURCES OF DIFFERENT NATIONS. 



twinkling, there being scarcely a morsel for each." 

 This description of the Rev. Dr. Lang will remind the 

 classical reader of Juvenal's picture of the abominations 

 of the ancient Egyptians : — 



" Ast ilium in plurima sectum 



Frusta eic particulas, ut multis mortuns unns 



Sufficeret, totum corrosis ossibus edit 



Victrix turba. 



. . . . TJltimus autem 



Qui stetit absumpto jam toto corpore, ductis 



Per terram digitis, aliquid de sanguine gnstat." 



Oceania had always been the land of cannibalism 

 ■until civilisation shed its humanizing influence. All the 

 Polynesians from the Sandwich Isles and the Marquesas 

 to New Zealand, have been more or less given to anthro- 

 pophagy. 



New Guinea, the Fijis, the Louisiades, certain parts 

 of the Phillipine group, notwithstanding the vicinity 

 of the Spanish colonists, killed men to eat them. The 

 Kanatis of the French colony of Nouka Keva with 

 difficulty renounced the practice. 



" Why do you eat your enemies ? " demanded M. Gar- 

 nier, an engineer, of one of these men. " Because," he re- 

 plied, " they are good eating, as excellent as pork or veal." 

 A little deformed infant having been born, was washed in 

 the sea andljooked with the yams, and eaten by, among 

 others, the mother. 



Cannibalism is altogether unknown in the Banks 

 Islands, but is more or less practised nearly everywhere 

 else in Melanesia. 



The Tongans are not cannibals. Some of the Tongan 

 warriors who visited Fiji and fought in the wars there, 

 became man-eaters, but they were looked upon with 

 horror by their countrymen. This statement finds con- 

 firmation in the fact that there are no cannibal words 

 in the Tongan language. The Fijian, on the contrary, is 

 full of them.* 



* " Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria," vol. xvi. 

 p. 134. 



