In _Shanghai_, during the Taeping siege, Wilson describes an English merchant, who met his native servant carrying the heart of a rebel, and on enquiring the disposition which he proposed to make of it, replied “that he was taking it home to eat for the purpose of making him brave.” The _Battaks_ or _Battas_, a race of people at Batta, in the north of Sumatra, and an offshoot of the Malay stock, are cannibals. They are heathen, very superstitious, and in courage surpass all the other tribes of Sumatra. Anthropophagy, it is said, still exists among them; nor has the distant Dutch government on the west coast as yet succeeded in eradicating the great moral blemish ascribed to these natives. Marsden describes them as being so fond of their aged kinsfolk, that they seldom lose a chance to _eat_ them. Rev. Henry Lyman was one of the first missionaries sent to the East Indian Archipelago, by the American Board of Foreign Missions, in 1834. As he was departing for his field of labor, a friend humorously ventured to express the hope that he would not “_disagree_ with those savages.” Whether he did or not, can never be told, as this martyr was eaten by the natives soon after his arrival at Sumatra. Another authority fully as reliable, Mr. Anderson, relates that these Battaks not only eat their dead victims, but begin their consumption before they have been deprived of life; and the causes that provoke this disposition are midnight robbery, treacherous attacks, and intermarriage. Junghuhn declares that warlike ferocity prompted these people to eat their enemies; he also describes them as regarding human flesh a great delicacy. In fact, they devoured not only war-captives, but even criminals, slaves, and their aged relations. They speak a peculiar language, have an original alphabet or character, and write on pieces of bamboo. They commence at the bottom of the page, write from right to left, and make books of the inner bark of a species of palm. Herodotus in the course of his history describes some of the funeral feasts in _Central Asia_. It would appear that at the time of which he was speaking the people there ate the bodies of the deceased, and the skulls were set in gold and carefully preserved. This act was interpreted as a sacred rite, and religious ceremonies were connected with it in honor of the dead. The _Thibetans_, who belong ethnographically, to the Mongolian race, had the like custom of regaling themselves upon their defunct ancestors; and Rubruquis adds that they used also skulls as cups from which they drank. With these people tradition reaches back to the first century before Christ, at which time the country was divided into numerous small kingdoms. In the first century after Christ, fifty-three of these kingdoms became tributary to the dragon throne of China; a prince of India united the others on the Yarlung River into one state, and Thibet became a Chinese province.