Page:OntheConductofMantoInferiorAnimals.pdf/60

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CANNIBALISM.
15

ness, and depravity. An eminent Portuguese naturalist is the author of the following extracts on this subject. A copy of the paper containing them was given by him from his own manuscript, never published, to Dr. G. H. Langsford, physician to Prince Christian of Waldeck at Lisbon, on the 5th of January 1798, who translated it into German, and sent it to Professor Voigt of Jena. [See his "Magazin. für den nuesten zustand der Naturkunde," vol. 1, p. 3.] "During a dreadful famine in India, which destroyed more than a hundred thousand persons, when the roads and streets were covered with dead bodies, because people had not sufficient strength to inter them, I saw several have the resolution to preserve their lives by this disgusting food; but some of them, tho' not many, found it so delicious that, when the famine was at an end, they retained such an irresistible propensity to eat human flesh that they lay in wait for the living in order to devour them. Besides others, there was a mountaineer who concealed himself in a forest near the highway, where he used to cast a rope, with a noose, over the heads of the passengers, whom he afterwards cut to pieces to gratify his unnatural appetite. He had killed many persons in this manner, but was at length caught and executed. At the same time, and owing to the same cause, a woman used to go out for the express purpose of carrying away children who had strayed from their homes. She stopped up their noses and mouths with clay, that they might not call for assistance, and by these means suffocated them. She confessed the fact on being taken, and some salted human flesh was found in her habitation. My servant having entered it, observed a girl of four or five years of age, who had been suffocated in this manner, and who