After telling an almost unprintable tale, Dr. Brinton says of the Australian blacks that “among several tribes it was an established custom for a mother to kill and eat her first child, as it was believed to strengthen her for later births. “In the Luritcha tribe, young children are sometimes killed and eaten, and it is not an infrequent custom, when a child is in weak health, to kill a younger and healthy one and then to feed the weakling on its flesh, the idea being that this will give to the weak child the strength of the stronger one.”[63] Frank admission that the children are in the way and are a burden, may be regarded either as a sign that the tribe has progressed, or that it has not yet reached the point of shame where it cloaks the evil practice under the guise of religious sacrifices, hygienic or customary regulations. In this regard it is not possible to say that the father, as opposed to the mother, is more inclined to do away with offspring, or is more frequently entrusted with that grewsome duty, although I would venture to say that an exhaustive research on this one aspect of the study would probably show that the mother at first opposed and gradually accepted, under the force of man’s will, the idea that the destruction of her offspring was good; first for herself and her lord and master, and secondly for the tribe. Should investigation uphold such an hypothesis, it would be easily understood how the frank acknowledgment represented an advanced stage, when the woman, no longer satisfied with the various trivial excuses offered for the destruction of her young, insisted on keeping them alive, and was met with, not the many invented reasons that we have seen, but the plain truth, that their continued existence endangered the food supply. “Urgent want and sterility of the niggardly earth” were the reasons given by the natives of the island of Radnack for the law limiting the number of children.[64] A second child is killed among the natives of Central Australia “only when the mother is, or thinks she is, unable to rear it”[65] and yet the same authors say that “an Australian native never looks far enough ahead to consider what will be the effect on the food supply in future years, if he allows a particular child to live; what affects him is simply the question of how it will interfere with the work of his wife so far as their own camp is concerned; while, from the woman’s side, the question is, can she provide food enough for the new-born infant and the next youngest?”[66] The long suckling time, that these authors and other travellers have noted, and that is here given as a reason, as _opposed_ to the economic one, for the frequent killing of children, is due “chiefly to want of soft food and animal milk”.[67]