Cannibalism was partly an act of revenge, a desire more completely to extinguish a fallen enemy, and in part a sacrifice to the gods of the victorious tribe, or it began as an act of atonement or propitiation to win the favour of a deity. In New Caledonia and New Zealand--perhaps also in Fiji--it was often provoked by mere hunger for meat, a hunger less easy to satisfy than in the large islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and the mainland of New Guinea, where there were the great Cassowary birds, large fruit bats, tree kangarus, phalangers, and an immense variety of pigeons. In religion there was mostly this difference between Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians: the two latter had castes of priests who devoted themselves to the conduct of religious ceremonies, and were often unmarried; whereas amongst the Melanesians and Papuans there were no priests, anyone--usually the chief of the village or tribe--being competent to sacrifice to the gods, or to conduct the semi-religious ceremonies (so like those of Negro Africa) connected with birth and death: most of all, the solemn rites observed in the initiation of boys and girls into the duties of adult life on their entering manhood or womanhood. The dwarf Negroes or Negritos of New Guinea and the islands to the west had very little religious belief; the Papuans more, but not so much as the Melanesians of the Pacific archipelagoes. These last, no doubt, had been taught and influenced for many hundred years by the Polynesians. All these peoples believed in a variety of gods, devils, spirits, and fairies. (The Fijians even believed in water-babies!) Sometimes the supernatural being was the soul of a deceased hero or chief, canonized after his death, and still working for or against the survivors in the form of a shark, a turtle, a fish, snake, or lizard. Stones and trees were worshipped as the form or the home of a god; so were lizards, snakes, birds, the sea, a volcano, the sun, the moon, stars, and vault of heaven. Nearly everything of fixed form had a soul, was alive, was connected in some way with the spirit world. A belief among Papuans, Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians in the immortality of human beings was almost universal. Only perhaps among the Negritos was it absent or "not thought about".