We have already seen that the Papuans restricted their families to two children, when it was possible. As late as the middle of the seventeenth century, Dapper reported that in Benin no twins were found, as it was regarded as a sign of dishonour for a woman to have twins.[38] Among the Arunta tribes in Central Australia, twins are “immediately killed as something which is unnatural.”[39] Among northern tribes they “are usually destroyed as something uncanny.”[40] With the Kaffirs, it was found that “when twins are born, one is usually neglected and allowed to die.”[41] Of the western Victorian tribes we learn that “twins are as common among them as among Europeans; but as food is occasionally very scarce and a large family troublesome to move about, it is lawful and customary to destroy the weaker twin child, irrespective of sex.”[42] In some parts of the Benin territory, according to a contemporary of Dapper, the twin-bearing women are treated very badly. According to Nyendael, they actually kill both mother and infants, and sacrifice them to a certain devil, which they fondly imagine harbours in a wood near the village. “But if,” says this authority, “the man happens to be more than ordinarily tender, he generally buys off his wife, by sacrificing a female slave in her place; but the children are without possibility of redemption obliged to be made the satisfactory offerings which this savage law requires. In the year 1699, a merchant’s wife, commonly called _ellaroe_ or _mof_, lay-in of two children, and her husband redeemed her with a slave, but sacrificed his children. After which I had frequent opportunities of seeing and talking with the disconsolate mother, who never could see an infant without a very melancholy reflection on the fate of her own, which always extorted briny tears from her. The following year the like event happened to a priest’s wife. She was delivered of two children, which, with a slave, instead of his wife, he was obliged to kill and sacrifice with his own hands, by reason of his sacerdotal function; and exactly one year after, as though it had been a punishment inflicted from heaven, the same woman was the second time delivered of two children, but how the priest managed himself on this occasion I have not been informed, but am apt to think that this poor woman was forced to atone for her fertility by death. These dismal events have in process of time made such impressions on men, that when the time of their wives’ delivery approaches, they send them to another country; which makes me believe that for the future they will correct these inhumanities.”[43] On the west coast of Africa “twins are killed among all the Niger Delta tribes, and in districts out of English control the mother is killed too,”[44] which shows the fanatic point to which a belief, or rather an excuse, founded on the economic desire to keep down the size of a family, may be carried.