they know, we must admit that man, who formerly was a granivorous animal, became a flesh-eater during the glacial period.  He found plenty of deer at that time, but deer often migrate in the Arctic regions, and sometimes they entirely abandon a territory for a number of years.  In such cases his last resources disappeared.  During like hard trials, cannibalism has been resorted to even by Europeans, and it was resorted to by the savages.  Until the present time, they occasionally devour the corpses of their own dead:  they must have devoured then the corpses of those who had to die.  Old people died, convinced that by their death they were rendering a last service to the tribe.  This is why cannibalism is represented by some savages as of divine origin, as something that has been ordered by a messenger from the sky.  But later on it lost its character of necessity, and survived as a superstition.  Enemies had to be eaten in order to inherit their courage; and, at a still later epoch, the enemy’s eye or heart was eaten for the same purpose; while among other tribes, already having a numerous priesthood and a developed mythology, evil gods, thirsty for human blood, were invented, and human sacrifices required by the priests to appease the gods.  In this religious phase of its existence, cannibalism attained its most revolting characters.  Mexico is a well-known example; and in Fiji, where the king could eat any one of his subjects, we also find a mighty cast of priests, a complicated theology,(38) and a full development of autocracy.  Originated by necessity, cannibalism became, at a later period, a religious institution, and in this form it survived long after it had disappeared from among tribes which certainly practised it in former times, but did not attain the theocratical stage of evolution.  The same remark must be made as regards infanticide and the abandonment of parents.  In some cases they also have been maintained as a survival of olden times, as a religiously-kept tradition of the past.

I will terminate my remarks by mentioning another custom which also is a source of most erroneous conclusions.  I mean the practice of blood-revenge.  All savages are under the impression that blood shed must be revenged by blood.  If any one has been killed, the murderer must die; if any one has been wounded, the aggressor’s blood must be shed.  There is no exception to the rule, not even for animals; so the hunter’s blood is shed on his return to the village when he has shed the blood of an animal.  That is the savages’ conception of justice—­a conception which yet prevails in Western Europe as regards murder.  Now, when both the offender and the offended belong to the same tribe, the tribe and the offended person settle the affair.(39) But when the offender belongs to another tribe, and that tribe, for one reason or another, refuses a compensation, then the offended tribe decides to take the revenge itself.  Primitive folk so much consider every one’s acts as a