Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/218

206 they became incurable; and the Issedones did the same, resembling, in this particular, the Tupis of Brazil, who, when the pajé (chief) despaired of a man's recovery to health, killed and ate the invalid—a rough-and-ready method of proving that their respected chief and medicine-man could not be mistaken in his diagnosis of the case.

Our own hero-king, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, is said to have eaten human flesh during the Crusades; the popular belief of the time being that the cooked head of a Saracen had restored him to strength and activity from a bed of sickness. A verse of a contemporary ballad records this:

 King Richard shall warrant There is no flesh so nourissant Unto an Englishman, Partridge, plover, heron, ne swan, Cow ne ox, sheep ne swine, As the head of a Sarazyne."

The probable causes for this strange variation from normal appetite are more numerous than would be supposed. Famine and the consequent insistent demands of hunger are the likeliest primary causes of this as well as of most things—the necessity for food being the first and most urgent incentive to action of all sorts. Modern stories of shipwreck, when the survivors have taken to the boats and all food is gone, or of travel in the barren wastes of Australia, show how naturally this means of prolonging life suggests itself to the minds of men ravenous with hunger, and from whom the thin cloak of civilization, with which we all hide the natural animal, has fallen away.

Enmity, hatred, and revenge are also excellent reasons for the origin of cannibalism, which would be almost as likely as hunger to have suggested it, as famine is not a constant factor in savage life, and we are led to suppose that hostility and rancor are. What more satisfactory method for the expression of detestation and contempt can be imagined, than that one should cook and calmly eat an enemy when one has slain him? The thing is then complete, finis coronat opus, the termination rounds and finishes the deed to a perfect whole; without this climax it were but half accomplished and entirely unsatisfactory. The happy and peaceful mind and the satisfied and replete body of a savage who has killed and cooked his foe, and eaten him, can easily be imagined, and they present a pleasant picture to the mind that is marred by no sense of incompleteness.

In many places, however, where food was plentiful, and where the people were otherwise amiable and gentle, and far advanced toward an admirable civilization—for instance, Mexico and Peru before the Spanish conquest—this custom of cannibalism prevailed, and to an extent that necessitated frequent wars for the providing of the requisite victims. Here the cause was of a more complex nature than the