family who may have been cut off in battle.

All this would go to prove that the cannibalism of the New Zealanders
had, on its first introduction, been intimately associated with certain
feelings or notions which seemed to demand the act as a duty, and not
at all with any circumstances of distress or famine which compelled a
resort to it as a dire necessity. There is too much reason for
apprehending, however, that the unnatural repast, having ceased in this
way to be regarded with that disgust with which it is turned from by
every unpolluted appetite, has now become an enjoyment in which they not
unfrequently indulge without any reference to the considerations which
originally tempted them to partake of it. Indeed, such a result, instead
of being incredible or improbable, would appear to be almost an
inevitable consequence of the general and systematic perpetration, under
any pretext, of so daring an outrage upon Nature as that of which these
savages are, on all hands, allowed to be guilty.

The practice of cannibalism, which has prevailed among other nations as
well as the New Zealanders, has probably not had always exactly the same
origin. According to Mr. Mariner, it is of very recent introduction
among the people of Tonga, having been unknown among them till it was
imported about fifty or sixty years ago, along with other warlike
tastes, by their neighbours of the Fiji Islands, whose assistance had
been called in by one of the parties in a civil struggle. Here is an
instance of the practice having originated purely in the ferocity
engendered by the habit of war. In other cases it has, perhaps, arisen
out of the kindred practice of offering up human beings as sacrifices
to the gods.

Humboldt, in his work on the indigenous inhabitants of South America,