However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,—­that it is unnatural and against our religion,—­and that so remarkable a diversity of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to different races.  We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a different race.  Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules.  How they came to be wafted to the opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it.  Suffice it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word.  Possibly old Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook.  Who can prove the contrary?

As to the first of these objections, we admit that some people may feel a degree of aversion to roast-homme; but so does the Mahometan abominate roast “short pig”; and a Brahmin, taken to Cincinnati and its environs, at the sanguinary hog-murder time, would die outright, of horror.  We almost died, ourselves, at the sickening sight of that porcian massacre. De gustibus non est disputantibus, as our colonel used to say.  Disgust, is the result of a special treaty of amity and reciprocity between the stomach and the imagination, differing according to difference in the contracting parties.  We have known many persons who would not touch mutton, and others who would rather starve than eat oysters; while we ourselves revolt at sourkrout, which, nevertheless, millions of Germans, French, and Americans consider delicious.  Disgust is arbitrary; it does not furnish us with a philosophical ground for argumentation.  The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted?  When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement, he cut the choicest bits from his living prisoner, in order to baste them to a turn and season them with choice pepper.

Is it unnatural?  We have once seen, with our own eyes, a very large unroasted “small pig” devour one of her own piglets, whilst the others lustily drew nourishment from the grunting mother.  It look our appetite away for forty-eight hours; yet it was nature; and in some portions of Europe, people express the highest degree of fondness by the expressive phrase,—­“I could eat you.”  We may rely upon it, that, as Mr. Agassiz says,—­“There is no difference in kind, but only in degree.”