his share of the common food.  Arctic expeditions have done the same when they no more could carry their invalid comrades.  “Live a few days more. may be there will be some unexpected rescue!” West European men of science, when coming across these facts, are absolutely unable to stand them; they can not reconcile them with a high development of tribal morality, and they prefer to cast a doubt upon the exactitude of absolutely reliable observers, instead of trying to explain the parallel existence of the two sets of facts:  a high tribal morality together with the abandonment of the parents and infanticide.  But if these same Europeans were to tell a savage that people, extremely amiable, fond of their own children, and so impressionable that they cry when they see a misfortune simulated on the stage, are living in Europe within a stone’s throw from dens in which children die from sheer want of food, the savage, too, would not understand them.  I remember how vainly I tried to make some of my Tungus friends understand our civilization of individualism:  they could not, and they resorted to the most fantastical suggestions.  The fact is that a savage, brought up in ideas of a tribal solidarity in everything for bad and for good, is as incapable of understanding a “moral” European, who knows nothing of that solidarity, as the average European is incapable of understanding the savage.  But if our scientist had lived amidst a half-starving tribe which does not possess among them all one man’s food for so much as a few days to come, he probably might have understood their motives.  So also the savage, if he had stayed among us, and received our education, may be, would understand our European indifference towards our neighbours, and our Royal Commissions for the prevention of “babyfarming.”  “Stone houses make stony hearts,” the Russian peasants say.  But he ought to live in a stone house first.

Similar remarks must be made as regards cannibalism.  Taking into account all the facts which were brought to light during a recent controversy on this subject at the Paris Anthropological Society, and many incidental remarks scattered throughout the “savage” literature, we are bound to recognize that that practice was brought into existence by sheer necessity. but that it was further developed by superstition and religion into the proportions it attained in Fiji or in Mexico.  It is a fact that until this day many savages are compelled to devour corpses in the most advanced state of putrefaction, and that in cases of absolute scarcity some of them have had to disinter and to feed upon human corpses, even during an epidemic.  These are ascertained facts.  But if we now transport ourselves to the conditions which man had to face during the glacial period, in a damp and cold climate, with but little vegetable food at his disposal; if we take into account the terrible ravages which scurvy still makes among underfed natives, and remember that meat and fresh blood are the only restoratives which