paragraph. And so with the
island cannibals. They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are
a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to cut a man's flesh after
he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives; and
even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly
and painlessly despatched at last. In island circles of refinement it
was doubtless thought bad taste to expatiate on what was ugly in the
practice.

Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas
to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the lively haunt of
its exercise, there by scanty but significant survivals. Hawaii is the
most doubtful. We find cannibalism chronicled in Hawaii, only in the
history of a single war, where it seems to have been thought
exceptional, as in the case of mountain outlaws, such as fell by the
hand of Theseus. In Tahiti, a single circumstance survived, but that
appears conclusive. In historic times, when human oblation was made in
the marae, the eyes of the victim were formally offered to the chief: a
delicacy to the leading guest. All Melanesia appears tainted. In
Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than
that of a tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert
zone I long looked and asked in vain. I was told tales indeed of men who
had been eaten in a famine; but these were nothing to my purpose, for
the same thing is done under the same stress by all kindreds and
generations of men. At last, in some manuscript notes of Dr. Turner's,
which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on one damning evidence:
on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for theft was to be killed and
eaten. How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so
vast an area, among people of such varying civilisation, and, with
whatever intermixture, of such different blood? What circumstance is
common to them all, but that they lived on islands destitute, or very
nearly so, of animal food? I can never find it in my appetite that man
was meant to live on vegetables only. When our stores ran low among the
islands, I grew to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us
to open another tin of miserable mutton. And in at least one ocean
language, a particular word denotes that a man is "hungry for fish,"
having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his
soul, like those of the Hebrews in