CANNIBALISM PRICED

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1935, Page 10

CANNIBALISM PRICED

HOW MUCH TO EAT EARTHWORM? For how much money, paid in cash, would you eat a quarter of a pound of cooked human flesh, Supposing that the fact . . . will appear next day on the front page of all the New York papers? , Such was one of the questions which the famous psychologist of Columbia University (U.S.), Edward Lee Thorndike, lately put to 40 unemployed young men and women (says ‘Time’). The men asked a medium price of 260,000,000d0l (normally £52,000,000), the ■women 1,375,000d01. (normally £275,000). Next Professor Thorndike promised them secrecy in their cannibalism. Promptly the’men lost their squeamishness and dropped their price to 50,000d0l (normally £10,000). The women still wanted 750,000 dol (normally £150,000). Finally Dr. Thorn dike made the same offer to 24 unemployed men and women aged more than 40. Two-thirds of them flatly refused to practice cannibalism at any price. Dr. Thorndike wanted chiefly to find out whether oldsters get set in their ways. Recently he published the results of nine years of research along that and other bypaths of his theory that oldsters are as educable as youngsters. Dr. Thorndike, musing a suspicion that many of his subjects were liars, wished he had real money to offer them. Wrote he: “A person setting 1,000,000d01. (normally £200,000) as the price for eating an earthworm might well do it for lOOdol. (normally £25) if someone actually put the cash before him.” This item evoked some interesting correspondence. John H. Denison, counsellor at law, of Denver (Colorado), wrote: A man once did eat an earthworm, fresh, fat. and raw, for 25 cents cash (about 1/-), then and there paid by his farmer employer. I did not see it, but I knew both parties, and my informant was the employer’s son. This throws into my mind some doubt of the value of Professor Thorndike’s statistics. John Barwood, of South Hingham, Massachusetts: When the conversational medicine ball had been thrown back and forth enough this Sunday morning we decided to put the question of the price of eating an earthworm to Mr. Upshot: a friend of mine (incidentally a Harvard student —perhaps that explains it) totally consumed a fairly good-sized angleworm for the small fee of 25 cents. We concluded that l>r. Thorndike’s price of lOOdol. was a little high. ‘Time’ added the following information: Near Brownstown. Ind., last fortnight Harold Jankowitz. 20, CCC worker, chewed the head off a black snake for Idol. Said he: "1 didn’t really bite its head off. I mostly pulled it off. The snake was too lough,” Worker Jankowitz added the dollar to a fund with which he hopes to pay for an eye operation so he may take a West Point entrance examination.