. . PERS. I . . MADRI.
Cannibals still exist in several parts of the world. The Birhor of the Central Provinces of India are said to eat their aged relatives, who invite their relations to kill and eat them.
The Aghora, a disgusting sect of saiva Eindus, are said to have eaten human beings till close to the middle of the 19th century.
Tribes of the Baita race in Sumatra, and some of the New Zealanders, continued to do so until towards the latter part of the 19th century.
Mr. Stanley and the missionaries describe many cannibal tribes on the banks of the Congo river in Central Africa, and of other races on the New Calabar river. The Immithlanga, a Zulu tribe, and the Moshesh in S. Africa, were cannibals ; also the Fan of the west coast of Central Africa, and the Niant or Sandeh in the region of the Gazelle Nile, and the light-coloured civilised Monbuttoo race on the Uelle river. In the instance of the Basuto people the habit had newly arisen.
At the time of the Taiping insurrection in China, an English merchant in Shanghai met his servant in the street carrying home the heart of a rebel, with the avowed intention of eating it to increase his own courage.
The ancient Mexicans were cannibals.
Papuans of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and the Fiji group, were cannibals. It is common to all Polynesians, in the Marquesas Islands, the Hawai group, Tahiti, and the Maori of New Zealand. The Australians are not habitual cannibals. The odious rite exists with considerable civilisation. The natives of the Solomon Islands are dwarfish, but they build canoes which are ' perfect gems of beauty,' and they have a fine sense of vocal harmony. The New Hebrideans have a yet more inveterate love than these vocalists for human flesh. In one of the islands, Aneityum, the natives have been cured of the bad habit by the missionaries ; but the popula tion, which was 12,000, is now but a sixth part of that total. Epidemic diseases and a sudden change from barbarism to civilisation are the causes. Nowhere was the passion for human flesh more violent than with the Fijians. At great feasts twenty bodies would be served up at once. No
solemnity was perfect in the times before British domination 1M1 ithout human sacrifices. When a chief died, wives and slaves were buried with him. When a chiefs house was built, a slave was buried under each pole which held it up. The Fijian had a firm belief in a future state, in which the actual condition of the dying person is per petuated. Thus a young man, being unable to eat, was buried alive by his father at his own request, lest he should grow thin and weak. Somewhat luxuriously he asked to be strangled first ; but he was scolded and told to be quiet, and be buried like other people, and give no more trouble ; and he was buried accordingly.' Anthropophagy has vanished with the people themselves from among the Iroquois and Algon kin ; it has disappeared from among the people of the high plains of Anahuac, the Indians of Peru, and most Brazilian races. It is increasingly circumscribed in the Southern Ocean by the dying out of the cannibal races, and the pressure of white settlers. The number of cannibals is still, however, very considerable. The Batta of Sumatra, according to Friedman, may be reckoned at 200,000 souls; the cannibals of the Niger delta at 100,000; the Fan, according to Fleuriot de Langle, at 80,000 ; the cave dwellers of the Basuto country (about a tenth of the whole population), at 10,000; the Niam Niam, at about 500,000 ; the Miranha and Mesay, according to Marloy, at 2000; other South American cannibals, at 1000 ;• the Australian aborigines? at '50,000 ; the Melanesians (without including New Guinea), 1,000,000,—a total at the present of 1,943,000 human beings addicted to anthropoplingy. A native paper of British India, in A.D. 1870, stated that a person had been trans ported for life by tho Session Court at Jhansi, on a charge of eating dead human bodies stolen from graves. It was said that he had lived on this fare for a number of years.—.P. /If. Gazette ; Richard Andre in the Erganzungs blatiern ; Dalton's Ethno logy; Newbold's British Se ttlements, ii. pp. 370– 373 ; Peschel, Races of Man, p. 161. See Aghora ; Batta; Birhor.