number may be distinguished by his proud bearing.  But the head hunter’s strangest and strongest motive is the desire to please women!  No Dyak maiden would condescend to marry a youth who has never killed a man, and in times when the chances for murder were few and far between, suitors have been compelled to wait a year or two before they could bag a skull and lead home their blushing bride.  The weird details of this mode of courtship will be given in the chapter on Island Love on the Pacific.

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS.

In all these cases we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life.  But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family.  I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words regarding the maternal sentiment.  The love of a mother for her offspring is by many philosophers considered the earliest and strongest of all sympathetic feelings; a feeling stronger than death.  If we can find a wide-spread failure of this powerful instinct, we shall have one more reason for not assuming as a matter of course, that the sentiment of love must have been always present.

In Australian families it has been the universal custom to bring up only a few children in each family—­usually two boys and a girl—­the others being destroyed by their own parents, with no more compunction than we show in drowning superfluous puppies or kittens.  The Kurnai tribe did not kill new-born infants, but simply left them behind.  “The aboriginal mind does not seem to perceive the horrid idea of leaving an unfortunate baby to die miserably in a deserted camp” (Fison and Howitt, 14).  The Indians of both North and South America were addicted to the practice of infanticide.  Among the Arabs the custom was so inveterate that as late as our sixth century, Mohammed felt called upon, in various parts of the Koran, to discountenance it.  In the words of Professor Robertson Smith (281): 

“Mohammed, when he took Mecca and received the homage of the women in the most advanced centre of Arabian civilization, still deemed it necessary formally to demand from them a promise not to commit child-murder.”

Among the wild tribes of India there are some who cling to their custom of infanticide with the tenacity of fanatics.  Dalton (288-90) relates that with the Kandhs this custom was so wide-spread that in 1842 Major Macpherson reported that in many villages not a single female child could be found.  The British Government rescued a number of girls and brought them up, giving them an education.  Some of these were afterward given in marriage to respectable Kandh bachelors,