crickets. They were fleet-footed like the creatures of the rocks, the troglodyte Ethiopians being, says Herodotus, the swiftest of men. The inhabitants of the country of the Robbers (Lestai) in Farther Asia, says Ptolemy, were savages, living in caves, and “having skins like the hide of the hippopotamus which darts cannot pierce." Artemidorus speaks of naked nighttraveling troglodytes of Arabia who put away their dead amid laughter. There are cave-dwellers to this day in southern Cambodia, and a Chinese account of the thirteenth century tells of the skin breastplates which they wore.

The ancients knew of various races of troglodytes, notably those along both shores of the Red Sea. Others were in Syria, and upon the Nile, and in Fezzan, and in the Caucasus. The voiceless troglodytes of Pliny are supposed to be the Rock Tibboos on whose whistling speech their neighbors still comment. The best account of the elder cave-dwellers happens to be authentic history. When Xenophon was retreating with the Ten Thousand to the Black Sea he found upon the Armenian frontier a people who lived in underground burrows with vertical entrances like wells, up and down which they passed on ladders. Their beasts used a sloping path and lived with them underground, cattle, goats, and sheep thriving there on green fodder gathered above. These subterranean habitations were also granaries and wine-cellars.

With all their lively interest in the ways of troglodytes, the ancients knew less than the moderns about them, and were perhaps farther in spirit from the cave-man. In the caverns of western Europe men of to-day have studied his household economy, his art, and the animals he tamed or hunted. Travelers in various lands have come upon underground chambers, many of them still occupied. In the Berber rock-towns these subterranean dwellings number thousands, and the ravines which furrow the plateaus serve as their streets. On the Cappadocian plain deserted subterranean villages, called kataphugia, or places of refuge, underlie occupied villages of the surface, and thither the cattle descend in severe weather, as in Xenophon's time twenty-three centuries ago. The peoples of the surface are supposed to be descendants of true troglodytes.

The Anthropophagi

It never occurred to the early writers to classify men according to the color of their skins, or the breadth of their skulls, or fundamental differences in their languages; and the Greeks and Romans were ignorant of the Noachian genealogy and heedless of the apportionment of the earth among the sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth. But they had a rough-and-ready method of cataloguing savage races according to what they ate, in the thought that whatsoever a man ate, that in some degree he became. After naming the races of fable from the size of their feet or ears or other bodily peculiarity, they grouped and named, according to their supposed diet, various races of reality that dwelt at a distance.

Classic writers took passing note of the Anthropophagi, or tribes that ate human flesh. There were such peoples in Africa and in Asia. The best known account is the description in Herodotus of the Issedones. These Scythians of Central Asia ate the flesh of their deceased relatives prepared with other meat, and made gold-rimmed drinking cups of their skulls—a rite of honor to the dead. A tribe in northern Tibet is supposed to be descended from them.

The Ichthyophagi

The races that subsisted on fish, the Ichthyophagi, were described by the ancients with unusual detail. One of the first accounts is by Herodotus, who tells of the folk that lived on platforms above Lake Prasias. They drew their fish through trap-doors from the water beneath, and the custom was that for every woman a man took to wife he drove three piles into the lake.

All along the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea there were tribes of Ichthyophagi. Their very cattle ate dried fish and the beef had a fishy flavor; Ibn Batuta remarked this in Yemen, and it is still true of the Coromandel Coast. Arrian's account of the voyage of Nearchus describes the Ichthyophagi as occupying for four hundred miles the barren shores of the Mekran; they had few boats and were indifferent fishermen, but by intercepting the ebb tide with palm-bark nets they obtained their food.

Arrian repeats a legend of the origin of these tribes in whose lines one hears faintly the wild music of the Sirens. The island of Nosala, off the Mekran coast, was the residence of a Nereid "whose practice was to seduce such mariners as landed there to her embraces, and then, after transforming them into fish, to throw them into the sea." But the sun ordered the nymph to quit the island and himself changed the fish back into men. These were the first Ichthyophagi.

Farther west, in Ariana, were fish-eating tribes who made their dwellings, Strabo says, of shells and of the bones of large whales, the ribs furnishing the beams and supports, and the jawbones the doorways. Sections of the backbones of whales were used as mortars wherein sun-dried fish were pounded.

Diodorus Siculus has a spirited account of the Ichthyophagi along the Red Sea. This people, he says, do not use nets, but so wall the caverns and gullies of their rocky shore that the receding tide leaves the fish imprisoned there. Whereupon, with a shout, the tribe assembles on the beach. Women and children gather the little fish next the shore; with sharp goats' horns the men dispatch the larger ones, throwing all upon the land. The booty is put into stone pots tilted toward the south and the fish are fried by the sun until the flesh drops off. The bones are cast into a pile and the meat boiled with fruit seeds. Then everybody falls to and gorges. The heap of bones is a dietary reserve which the tribe pulverizes and devours when storms shut off the shore.

The life of these Ichthyophagi is thrown into a sort of rhythm by the need, every fifth day, of going inland on an extended journey for fresh water. For four days they fish continually and make merry in great throngs, "congratulating one another with harsh and discordant songs; then they fall promiscuously, as every man's lot chances, to company with their women for procreation sake." On the fifth day the tribe goes in a body to a district lying under the foot of the mountains where there are springs of sweet water. Hither, also, the shepherds drive the flocks. Nor do the shore folk differ much from the herds, for "they go making a horrid noise and without articulate voice." Arrived at the springs, they throw themselves on their faces and "drink as beasts until their stomachs are distended like a drum.”

Slowly they wend their way back to salt water, and for a day recline without tasting food. The following day they begin anew their fishing and feeding. Such is the round of their lives.

Diodorus remarks, apparently to commend, that these fisheaters "far exceed all other men in freedom from boisterous passions." They give no heed to a stranger, nor even look at one when he addresses them: "Nay, if they be assaulted with drawn swords they will not stir; and though they are hurt and wounded, yet they are not in the least provoked. Even though their wives and children be killed before their eyes, they show no sign of anger."

These accounts are not fables. But there is fabulous admixture, most of it arising from the primitive belief that a fish diet makes men as cool-blooded as the creatures upon which they live.

Other Dietary Nations

Akin to these nations were the Chelonophagi, or turtle-eaters, concerning whom Strabo recites facts entirely in keeping. This tribe lives under the cover of turtle shells, which also it uses as boats. Some of its members, however, collect seaweed in heaps, hollow the heaps, and dwell under them. Their dead are cast into the sea, and carried away by the tide to become food in turn for the fish and turtles.

The Acridophagi were grasshopper-eaters-insectivorous, ornithologists would call them. The locust was, and is, a favorite diet of desert peoples, a staple food of the Arab, as well as of the pygmy folk and other singular breeds. Niebuhr likens its taste to that of "a small sardine of the Baltic, which is dried in some towns of Holstein." What Dampier has to say of customs he found in two Pacific islands in 1687 may stand without essential change for the ways of earlier acridophagi: "They had another dish made of a sort of locusts, whose bodies are about one and one-half inches long, and as thick as the top of one's little finger; with large thin wings, and long and small legs. These came in great swarms to devour their potato leaves and other herbs; and the natives would go out with small nets and take a quart at one sweep. When they had enough they would parch them in an earthen pan; and then their wings and legs

would fall off, and their heads and backs would turn red like boiled shrimp. Their bodies, being full, would eat very moist, their heads would crackle in one's teeth. I did once eat of this dish, and like it well enough."

Certain other races living in Africa the ancients knew chiefly as specialists in diet. Pomponius places the Ophiophagi, or snake-eaters, on the Red Sea. Homer gives the Lotophagi, or lotus-eaters, a habitat on the Mediterranean coast. Agatharcides names the Rhizophagi or root-eaters who dwell on the banks of the Atbara and subsist on reed roots; and the Elephantophagi, farther inland, who hunt and eat the elephant. Also in the interior Diodorus places the ostrich-eating Struthophagi, and there Pliny places the Agriophagi "who live principally on the flesh of panthers and lions," and the Pamphagi "who will eat anything."

Geographical Glimpses

The citations below, from classical, medieval and modern writers, are reproduced because of their flavor and for whatever they are worth:

The Gamphasantes, who go naked, are unacquainted with war and hold no intercourse with strangers.

In the African deserts "men are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant," says Pliny-perhaps the mirage.

"On the one side of the Senegal," says John Lok, “the inhabitants are of high stature and black, and on the other side of browne or tawnie colour." The latter are the "tawny Moors" of Prince Henry's ship captains.

The Annamese of pure stock have a peculiar formation of the great toe whereby they are able to pick up small objects with their prehensile feet, says Keane. Their ancient Chinese name was Giao-chi, which signifies "with the big toe."

"Many of Canton and Quansi Provinces," says a Jesuit missionary in Purchas, “on their little toes have two nailes, as they have generally in Cochin-China."

On the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, says the seventhcentury History of the T'ang Dynasty, is a naked swarthy race