barbarians, who are less subject to the sway of reason, than civilized people, and has stimulated them to a degree of madness, which is capable of all kinds of excesses. The people who first consumed the body of their enemies, seem to have been bent upon exterminating their very inanimate remains, from an excess of passion; but, by degrees, finding the meat wholesome and palatable, it is not to be wondered at that they should make a practice of eating their enemies as often as they killed any, since the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself. It can only become dangerous as far as it steels the mind against that compassionate fellow-feeling, which is the great basis of society; and for this reason, we find it naturally banished from every people as soon as civilization has made any progress among them. But though we are too much polished to be cannibals, we do not find it unnaturally and savagely cruel to take the field, and to cut one another's throats by thousands, without a single motive, besides the ambition of a prince, or the caprice of his mistress! Is it not from prejudice that we are disgusted with the idea of eating a dead man, when we feel no remorse in depriving him of life? If the practice of eating human flesh makes men unfeeling and brutal, we have instances that civilized people, who would, perhaps, like some of our sailors, have turned sick at the thought of eating human flesh, have committed barbarities, without example, amongst cannibals. A New Zealander, who kills and eats his enemy, is a very different being from an European, who, for his amusement, tears an infant from the mother's breast, in cool blood, and throws it on the earth, to feed his hounds,--an atrocious crime, which Bishop Las Casas says, he saw committed in America by Spanish soldiers. The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast; though these circumstances have been related, with more or less truth, of the American Indians. It is therefore not improbable, that in process of time, they will entirely lay aside this custom; and the introduction of new domestic animals into their country might hasten that period, since greater affluence would tend to make them more sociable. Their religion does not seem likely to be an obstacle, because from what we could judge, they are not remarkably superstitious, and it is only among very bigotted nations that the custom of offering human flesh to the gods, has prevailed after civilization."--These are evidently hasty speculations, and by no