DOUBTS OBVIATED.

I have found that some persons (and among them my friend, the late Mr. Alexander Dalrymple) have entertained doubts of the reality of the fact that human flesh is anywhere eaten by mankind as a national practice, and considered the proofs hitherto adduced as insufficient to establish a point of so much moment in the history of the species.  It is objected to me that I never was an eyewitness of a Batta feast of this nature, and that my authority for it is considerably weakened by coming through a second, or perhaps a third hand.  I am sensible of the weight of this reasoning, and am not anxious to force any man’s belief, much less to deceive him by pretences to the highest degree of certainty, when my relation can only lay claim to the next degree; but I must at the same time observe that, according to my apprehension, the refusing assent to fair, circumstantial evidence, because it clashes with a systematic opinion, is equally injurious to the cause of truth with asserting that as positive which is only doubtful.  My conviction of the truth of what I have not personally seen (and we must all be convinced of facts to which neither ourselves nor those with whom we are immediately connected could ever have been witnesses) has arisen from the following circumstances, some of less, and some of greater authority.  It is in the first place a matter of general and uncontroverted notoriety throughout the island, and I have conversed with many natives of the Batta country (some of them in my own service), who acknowledged the practice, and became ashamed of it after residing amongst more humanized people.  It has been my chance to have had no fewer than three brothers and brothers-in-law, beside several intimate friends (of whom some are now in England), chiefs of our settlements of Natal and Tappanuli, of whose information I availed myself, and all their accounts I have found to agree in every material point.  The testimony of Mr. Charles Miller, whose name, as well as that of his father, is advantageously known to the literary world, should alone be sufficient for my purpose.  In addition to what he has related in his journal he has told me that at one village where he halted the suspended head of a man, whose body had been eaten a few days before, was extremely offensive; and that in conversation with some people of the Ankola district, speaking of their neighbours and occasional enemies of the Pa-dambola district, they described them as an unprincipled race, saying, “We, indeed, eat men as a punishment for their crimes and injuries to us; but they waylay and seize travellers in order to ber-bantei or cut them up like cattle.”  It is here obviously the admission and not the scandal that should have weight.  When Mr. Giles Holloway was leaving Tappanuli and settling his accounts with the natives he expostulated with a Batta man who had been dilatory in his payment.  “I would,” says the man, “have been here sooner, but my pangulu (superior officer) was