In the Viti Islands, whose natives are eulogized by Dumont-d'Urville as the most intelligent in Melanesia, great festivals are celebrated at different epochs of the year, which require a certain number of victims. Prisoners of war are the first to be immolated; then all those unfortunates who are without an asylum are hunted and collected; and if this inhuman chase should not be sufficiently productive, the purveyors eke out the supplies by adding some wretched women, who are eaten by their own relatives. Dumont-d'Urville speaks of a chief, named Tanoa, who, for a public banquet, caused thirty women to be slain, and their kin, far from murmuring or lamenting, took part in the hideous feast. In Africa, Captain Burton saw, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a cannibal people, named the Vouabembés, who feed upon carrion, vermin, larvæ, and insects, and carry their sluggishness and brutality to such an extreme as to eat raw and putrid human flesh. Although you may see on every countenance, says this adventurous traveller,[181] the expression of chronic hunger, the poor wretches, timid, fuliginous, stunted, degraded, seem far more dangerous enemies to the dead than to the living. Owing to the exertions of our missionaries, this horrible practice, against which our better nature instinctively rebels, is rapidly dying out in every region where their beneficial influence extends. In Polynesia and New Zealand, for instance, cannibalism is almost extinct. And if we owed no other service to the self-denying exertions of the soldiers of the Cross, this alone would entitle them to our gratitude, for the extermination of anthropophagy is the first step towards teaching man to reverence man. CHAPTER X. MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS--THE SAVAGE RACES--THE NEGROES. "When wild in woods the untutored savage ran."