people considers it a point of honor to repudiate the idea that its
ancestors fed on human flesh, and yet everywhere history tells us
of the practice of cannibalism. Herodotus speaks of it amongst the
Androphagae and the Issedones, people of Scythian origin; Aristotle
amongst the races living on the borders of the Pontus Euxinus;
Diodorus Siculus amongst the Galatians; and Strabo, in his turn,
says: "The Irish, more savage than the Bretons, are cannibals and
polyphagous; they consider it an honor to eat their parents soon
after life is extinct."[60]

From the ancient tombs of Georgia have been taken human bones that
have been boiled or charred, which were doubtless those of the victims
eaten by the assistants in the FETES which have ever accompanied
funeral rites.

In the fourth century of our era Jerome speaks of having met in Gaul
with the Attacotes, descended from a savage Scotch tribe, who fed on
human flesh, and that though they possessed great herds of cattle and
flocks of sheep, with numbers of pigs, for whom their vast forests
afforded excellent grazing grounds[61]; and though the Scandinavian
kitchen-middings have not so far yielded any traces of the practice of
cannibalism, Adam of Bremen, who preached Christianity at the court
of King Sweyn Ulfson, represents the Danes of his day as barbarians
clad in the skins of beasts, chasing the aurochs and the eland,
unable to do more than imitate the cries of animals and devouring
the flesh of their fellow-men.[62]

Nothing could exceed the barbarity of the Mexican sacrifices, the
numbers of the victims, and the refinements of torture to which they
were subjected. Prisoners, who had often been fattened for months