Other accounts, which we have from more recent authorities, concur in showing that the person who eats any part of the body of another whom he has slain in battle, fancies he secures to himself thereby a portion of the valour or good fortune which had hitherto belonged to his dead enemy.  The most common occasion, too, on which slaves are slain and eaten is by way of an offering to the “mana” of a chief or any of his family who may have been cut off in battle.

All this would go to prove that the cannibalism of the New Zealanders had, on its first introduction, been intimately associated with certain feelings or notions which seemed to demand the act as a duty, and not at all with any circumstances of distress or famine which compelled a resort to it as a dire necessity.  There is too much reason for apprehending, however, that the unnatural repast, having ceased in this way to be regarded with that disgust with which it is turned from by every unpolluted appetite, has now become an enjoyment in which they not unfrequently indulge without any reference to the considerations which originally tempted them to partake of it.  Indeed, such a result, instead of being incredible or improbable, would appear to be almost an inevitable consequence of the general and systematic perpetration, under any pretext, of so daring an outrage upon Nature as that of which these savages are, on all hands, allowed to be guilty.

The practice of cannibalism, which has prevailed among other nations as well as the New Zealanders, has probably not had always exactly the same origin.  According to Mr. Mariner, it is of very recent introduction among the people of Tonga, having been unknown among them till it was imported about fifty or sixty years ago, along with other warlike tastes, by their neighbours of the Fiji Islands, whose assistance had been called in by one of the parties in a civil struggle.  Here is an instance of the practice having originated purely in the ferocity engendered by the habit of war.  In other cases it has, perhaps, arisen out of the kindred practice of offering up human beings as sacrifices to the gods.

Humboldt, in his work on the indigenous inhabitants of South America, gives us an interesting account of the introduction of this latter atrocity among the Aztecs, a people of Mexico, whose annals record its first perpetration to have taken place so late as the year 1317.

But the most extraordinary instance of cannibalism which is known to exist in the world is that practised by the Battas, an extensive and populous nation of Sumatra.  These people, according to Sir Stamford Raffles, have a regular government, and deliberative assemblies; they possess a peculiar language and written character, can generally write, and have a talent for eloquence; they acknowledge a God, are fair and honourable in their dealings, and crimes amongst them are few; their country is highly cultivated.  Yet this people, so far advanced in civilization,