Were a man forced to flee, it was considered an act of the greatest friendship if he delayed to decapitate a dead or wounded comrade, so that, though the latter's body might be rent in pieces, and very likely swallowed, his head might suffer no dishonour, and the family _mana_ be saved. The heads thus rescued were subjected to prolonged exposure to air and steam and smoke, after which they underwent treatment at the hands of experts. The final result was that the head retained a wonderfully lifelike appearance, the _moko_ marks remaining plainly visible. The heads were set up in places of honour, with that ceremony which these paladins of the South Seas invariably observed, to be handed down from generation to generation along with stirring tales of the valorous warriors upon whose shoulders they had once sat. We are learning that our brown hero was by no means faultless. He was not above insulting his vanquished foe, and saw no reason why he should not do a brave and helpless man to death with revolting tortures. The extinction of life did not satisfy him; he must mutilate the bodies of the slain and spurn the dishonoured corpse. Surely his appetite for revenge must now be glutted; his ingenuity can suggest nothing more in the way of _utu_; his passion-inflamed mind devise no further stroke of insolent hate. Alas! The violent climax is yet to be reached; the abysmal depth of degradation to be plumbed; the savage nature to be laid bare in all its hideousness. The pity of it! This man, so strong, so brave, so keen of intelligence; this man with brain so clever and hand so deft that he can fashion that wonderful thing, a war-canoe, with nought but tools wrenched from the unwilling earth; this man who is a loving husband, a fond father; who in future years is destined to take his place beside the white invader of his dominion; this man can sink to the level of the beast, which, having slain, must fall to and eat. Lower, indeed, he descends; for the brute kills that it may satisfy its hunger, but the Maori that he may inflict the crowning dishonour upon his dead foe and upon the children of the slain. Cannibalism, if not a respectable, is a very ancient practice, for Homer and Herodotus mention the _anthropophagi_; but it is impossible to say when it originated, and the why and wherefore of the horrid custom can be still less easily come at. Some have argued that it began in a craving for animal food; but these seem to have lost sight of the fact that there are in Africa cannibals who live in regions teeming with game, just as in the South Sea Islands there are cannibals who till modern times were forced to content themselves with an almost purely vegetable diet. If the same motive animated both of these in their adoption of the practice, that motive can obviously not have been a hankering after animal food.