child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send me dreadful
confirmation of all which I have here asserted. It is a list of some
Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts which
they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one domain of
human wickedness--that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain,
which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would yield
proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to
imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer
are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those
dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty.
A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for
a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten;
for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for
the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given
to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an
enemy; if only they have shed blood--it may have been the life of a
woman or a child--the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to
express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any
part of his body--his nose or tongue, for instance--cooking and eating
it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek:
hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this
enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently
capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's
Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote:
This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called
Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the
past.] four words to express the taking of human life--one to express a
father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with
other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the
slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction