The _Siamese_, besides a variety of
superior food, eat rats, lizards, and some kinds of insects. The
_Battas_ of Sumatra, prefer _human flesh_ to all other, and speak with
rapture of the soles of the feet and palms of the hands. Warm water is
the usual beverage of the _Manilla_ islanders. The _Japanese_, amongst
other things, drink a kind of beer distilled from rice, and called
_sacki_; it is kept constantly warm, and drunk after every morsel they
eat. Cocoa-nut milk and water, is the common beverage of the natives
of the _New Hebrides_. In _New Caledonia_ so great is the scarcity of
food, that the natives make constant war for the sake of eating their
prisoners, and sometimes, to assuage the cravings of hunger, they bind
ligatures tightly round their bodies and swallow oleaginous earth. The
_New Zealanders_ are cannibals sometimes in a dearth, and to gratify a
spirit of vengeance against their enemies. The _New Hollanders_, near
the sea, subsist on fish eaten raw, or nearly so; should a whale be
cast ashore, it is never abandoned until its bones are picked; their
substitute for bread, and that which forms their chief subsistence, is
a species of fern roasted, pounded between stones, and mixed with
fish. The general beverage of the negro tribes is palm-wine.
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