The Polynesians seem
regularly to have killed two-thirds of their children. In some parts
of East Africa the proportion of infants massacred at birth is said
to be the same. Only children born in certain presentations are
allowed to live. The Jagas, a conquering tribe in Angola, are
reported to have put to death all their children, without exception,
in order that the women might not be cumbered with babies on the
march. They recruited their numbers by adopting boys and girls of
thirteen or fourteen years of age, whose parents they had killed and
eaten. Among the Mbaya Indians of South America the women used to
murder all their children except the last, or the one they believed
to be the last. If one of them had another child afterwards, she
killed it. We need not wonder that this practice entirely destroyed
a branch of the Mbaya nation, who had been for many years the most
formidable enemies of the Spaniards. Among the Lengua Indians of the
Gran Chaco, the missionaries discovered what they describe as "a
carefully planned system of racial suicide, by the practice of
infanticide by abortion, and other methods.
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