said that within the last century the Hottentots devoured
the flesh and the entrails of wild beasts, uncleansed of their filth
and excrement, and whether sound or rotten. In a personal letter to
Captain Bourke, the Reverend J. Owen Dorsey reports that while among
the Ponkas he saw a woman and child devour the entrails of a beef with
their contents. Bourke also cites instances in which human ordure was
eaten by East Indian fanatics. Numerous authorities are quoted by
Bourke to prove the alleged use of ordure in food by the ancient
Israelites. Pages of such reference are to be found in the works on
Scatology, and for further reference the reader is referred to books on
this subject, of which prominent in English literature is that of
Bourke.

Probably the most revolting of all the perverted tastes is that for
human flesh. This is called anthropophagy or cannibalism, and is a
time-honored custom among some of the tribes of Africa. This custom is
often practised more in the spirit of vengeance than of real desire for
food. Prisoners of war were killed and eaten, sometimes cooked, and
among some tribes raw. In their religious frenzy the Aztecs ate the
remains of the human beings who were sacrificed to their idols. At
other times cannibalism has been a necessity. In a famine in Egypt, as
pictured by the Arab Abdullatif, the putrefying debris of animals, as
well as their excrement, was used as food, and finally the human dead
were used; then infants were killed and devoured, so great was the
distress. In many sieges, shipwrecks, etc., cannibalism has been
practiced as a last resort for sustaining life. When supplies have
given out several Arctic explorers have had to resort to eating the
bodies of their comrades. In the famous Wiertz Museum in Brussels is a
painting by this eccentric artist in which he has graphically portrayed
a woman driven to insanity by hunger, who has actually destroyed her
child with a view to cannibalism. At the siege of Rochelle it is
related that, urged by starvation, a father and mother dug up the
scarcely cold body of their daughter and ate it. At the siege of Paris
by Henry IV the cemeteries furnished food for the starving. One mother
in imitation of what occurred at the siege of Jerusalem roasted the
limbs of her dead child and died of grief under this revolting
nourishment.

St. Jerome states that he saw Scotchmen in the Roman armies in Gaul
whose regular diet was human flesh, and who had "d