Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/30

18 to render it into English verse, but the following is a literal translation of an extract from it in English prose. "My tayo (or friend) was a tall man, of lofty and proud bearing; in his glancing eye there glowed a warlike fire; his exploits, his martial boldness, were the boast of his tribe, and the tribes around spoke of them with trembling. He was a chief of high lineage, cousin and favourite of the king of the tribe, who was an impotent old rascal, a sinister man-eater, foundered with leprosy, brandy, and murder I had occasion to go to a neighbouring island to succour a shipwrecked vessel; on my return to the bay at the end of a week I sought my tayo; the king had eaten him! The high priest had said to the king. If old age and ill-health have bowed thy noble head, feed thyself on a warrior; his vigour, his suppleness, and his valiant soul will pass into thy body; and so, to incorporate in himself youth and strength, to refresh his thin blood by a thickened lymph, the king had eaten him on a large plate of bark, well peppered to his taste, and stuffed with potatoes." Thus the highest compliment you can pay a conquered enemy is to eat him. As the subject is not an agreeable one I shall not pursue it further, but shall merely refer to the evidence as to the practice of cannibalism in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages collected by various members of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archæology, and recorded in the report of their meeting at Paris in 1867.

13. Among primitive peoples, representing the Stone Age, the Eskimo of North America, who call themselves Innuits, or "the men" par excellence, may surely be reckoned. Evidence of the exercise by these people of the several flights of imagination that we have attributed to the neolithic stone workers is given in the reports of Dr. Franz Boas and Mr. Hill-Tout to the British Association, and of Mr. Lucien Turner and Mr. Nelson to the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Eskimo about Bering