cannibalism began as a question of food supply. In early
times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without
agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his
easiest prey. The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his
feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family,
or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or
combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food,
such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen. I saw Marquesan
women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of
sheer instinct and stomachic need. When salt is not to be had, the
desire for meat is most intense. In these valleys the upper tribes,
whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish,
were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in
Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none
of the coast tribes are guilty.

As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew,--and it became a
passion akin to the opium habit in some,--the supply of other meat
had little to do with its continuance. In New Britain human bodies
were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened
like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried
on in these empty tenements of the human soul.

Although cannibalism originated in a bodily need, man soon gave it
an emotional and spiritual meaning, as he has given them to all
customs that have their root in his physical being. Two forms of
cannibalism seem to have existed among the first historic peoples.
One was concerned with the eating of relatives and intimates, for
friendship's sake or to gain some good quality they possessed. Thus
when babies died, the Chavante mothers, on the Uruguay, ate them to
regain their souls. Russians ate their fathers, and the Irish, if
Strabo is to be credited, thought it good to eat both deceased
parents. The Lhopa of Sikkim, in Tibet, eat the bride's mother at
the wedding feast.

But Maori cannibalism, with its best exposition in the Marquesas,
was due to a desire for revenge, cooking and eating being the
greatest of insults. It was an expression of jingoism, a hatred for
all outside the tribe or valley, and it made the feud between
valleys almost incessant.

It was in no way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and
ways of