HEAD-HUNTERS NOT BLOODTHIRSTY

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6804, 7 January 1929, Page 2

HEAD-HUNTERS NOT BLOODTHIRSTY

PRACTICE PART OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL BELIEFS. Professor A. E. Heath, of Swansea, would destroy the hair-raising aspect of hpad-hunting savages who havo provided so many thrills for the small boy (says the ‘Manchester Guardian’). Addressing the summer school of the British Social Hygiene Council at Cambridge recently, he declared that headhunters were not bloodthirsty. It was extremely difficult, he said, to get rid of head-hunting in a certain part of the Empiie. “When they forbade the practice of a young man going to a neighbouring village and capturing a head there was an outcry, because the young women protested that they had no means of judging whether a young man was worth while or not. “Where were his heads?” they asked: If he could show his prizes they knew what they were getting in the marriage market. Some bright person suggested that, instead of capturing a head, they should collect unarmed a wild boar. It was much more difficult, and called for at least as muck skill and courage. That worked perfectly reasonably.”

Professor Heath said that tho business of head-hunting did not arise out of any peculiar bloodthirstiness. It was part of a body of moral, religious, and social beliefs and customs. “On the whole, headhunters, I think, are rather less bloodthirsty than other tribes where the practice does not hold good,” Handshaking was a mere habit now. and its origin was a custom forgotten. He shook hands with the director on arrival in the hall. The reason for it was that he took his dagger hand in his, and therefore was safer than he would have been if he had not done so.

Professor Heath’s subject was ‘Mental Hindrances to Human Development,’ and he said that there were plonty of physical hindrances, with which men seemed to be able to cope more or less successfully. The mental ones ho could not deal with completely. If anyone had toothache it was just as well not to try an antisuggestion that he had not, but to go to the dentist. Ho quoted a phrase: “Obesity is an adipose belief in onesolf as a substance,” and said that ho had no patience whatever with a suggestion that mental activity could perform that kind of miracle. “Tho nonsense about Peter Panism is dreadful when you come to think of it,” said the professor. “I have never yet . met a boy who would answer the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow older?’ with ‘I do not want to grow older.’ ” People were ruined by too close and too Arm an attitude to life determined by family or parents. If he had the choice between casual parents and those who were over-fond he would choose the former.