To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon
slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were
religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years. We
have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the
world.

Undoubtedly cannibalism began as a question of food supply. In early
times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without
agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his
easiest prey. The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his
feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family,
or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or
combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food,
such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen. I saw Marquesan
women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of
sheer instinct and stomachic need. When salt is not to be had, the
desire for meat is most intense. In these valleys the upper tribes,
whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish,
were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in
Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none
of the coast tribes are guilty.

As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew,--and it became a
passion akin to the opium habit in some,--the supply of other meat
had little to do with its continuance. In New Britain human bodies
were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened
like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried