No sooner does a young sick-faced theologue get safely through his ordination, as a baby finishes teething, than straightway he casts about him for an opportunity to carry on.  A pretext is soon found, and he goes at it hammer and tongs; and forty years after you shall find him at the same trick with as simple a faith, as exalted an expectation, as vigorous an impotence, as the day he began.

His carryings-on are as diverse in kind, as comprehensive in scope, as those of the most versatile negro minstrel.  He cuts as many capers in a lifetime as there are stars in heaven or grains of sand in a barrel of sugar.  Everything is fish that comes to his net.  If a discovery in science is announced, he will execute you an antic upon it before it gets fairly cold.  Is a new theory advanced-ten to one while you are trying to get it through your head he will stand on his own and make mouths at it.  A great invention provokes him into a whirlwind of flip-flaps absolutely bewildering to the secular eye; while at any exceptional phenomenon of nature, such as an earthquake, he will project himself frog-like into an infinity of lofty gymnastic absurdities.

In short, the slightest agitation of the intellectual atmosphere sets your average parson into a tempest of pumping like the jointed ligneous youth attached to the eccentric of a boy’s whirligig.  His philosophy of life may be boiled down into a single sentence:  Carry on and you will be happy.  Did We Eat One Another?

There is no doubt of it.  The unwelcome truth has long been suppressed by interested parties who find their account in playing sycophant to that self-satisfied tyrant Modern Man; but to the impartial philosopher it is as plain as the nose upon an elephant’s face that our ancestors ate one another.  The custom of the Fiji Islanders, which is their only stock-in-trade, their only claim to notoriety, is a relic of barbarism; but it is a, relic of our barbarism.

Man is naturally a carnivorous animal.  This none but greengrocers will dispute.  That he was formerly less vegetarian in his diet than at present, is clear from the fact that market-gardening increases in the ratio of civilization.  So we may safely assume that at some remote period Man subsisted upon an exclusively flesh diet.  Our uniform vanity has given us the human mind as the ne plus ultra of intelligence, the human face and figure as the standard of beauty.  Of course we cannot deny to human fat and lean an equal superiority over beef, mutton, and pork.  It is plain that our meat-eating ancestors would think in this way, and, being unrestrained by the mawkish sentiment attendant upon high civilization, would act habitually upon the obvious suggestion.  A priori, therefore, it is clear that we ate ourselves.