[39] Catlin, North American Indians, i. 217.
[40] Codrington, op. cit. p. 347. Turner, Samoa, p. 335 sq. (Efatese).
[41] Seemann, Viti, p. 193.
[42] Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 175.
[43] Hale, op. cit. p. 65. Williams and Calvert, op. cit. p. 156. See also Erskine, Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248.
[44] For instances, see Steinmetz, Endokannibalismus, passim.
[45] Ibid. pp. 3, 5, 17.
[46] Cf. Herodotus’ statement regarding the Massagetae, i. 216.
Closely connected with the custom of doing away with decrepit parents is the habit, prevalent among certain peoples, of abandoning or killing persons suffering from some illness.
“The white man,” Mr. Ward observes, “can never, as long as he may live in Africa, conquer his repugnance to the callous indifference to suffering that he meets with everywhere in Arab and Negro. The dying are left by the wayside to die. The weak drop on the caravan road, and the caravan passes on.”[47] Among the Kafirs instances are not rare in which the dying are carried to the bush and left to perish, and among some of them epileptics are cast over a precipice, or tied to a tree to be devoured by hyenas.[48] The Hottentots abandon patients suffering from small-pox.[49] The southern Tanàla in Madagascar take a person who becomes insensible during an illness, to the spot in the forest where they throw their dead, and should the unfortunate creature so cast away revive and return to the village, they stone him outright to death.[50] In New Caledonia “il est rare qu’un malade rend naturellement le dernier soupir: quand il n’a plus sa connaissance, souvent même avant son agonie, on lui ferme la bouche et les narines pour l’étouffer, ou bien on le tiraille de tous côtés par les jambes et par les bras.”[51] In Kandavu, of the Fiji Group, sick persons were often thrown into a cave, where the dead also were deposited.[52] In Efate, if a person in sickness showed signs of delirium, his grave was dug, and he was buried forthwith, to prevent the disease from spreading to other members of the family.[53] The Alfura “kill their sick when they have no hope of their recovery.”[54] Dobrizhoffer says of the Patagonians, “Actuated by an irrational kind of pity, they bury the dying before they expire.”[55] In cases of cholera or small-pox epidemics, North American Indians have been known to desert their villages, leaving all their sick behind, of whatever age or sex.[56] According to Dr. Nansen, it is not inconsistent with the moral code of the Greenlanders “to hasten the death of those who are sick and in great suffering, or of those in delirium, of which they have a great horror.”[57] Lieutenant Holm states that, in Eastern Greenland, when an individual is seriously ill, he consents, if his relatives request it, to end his sufferings by throwing himself into the sea; whereas it is rare that a sick person is put to death, except in cases of disordered intellect.[58] At Igloolik “a sick woman is frequently built or blocked up in a snow-hut, and not a soul goes near to look in and ascertain whether she be alive or dead.”[59]