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To the Editors: I am in full agreement with Dr. Devereux's contention that cannibalism is for adults only. His evidence culled from biological, anthropological and psychoanalytical data reduces infantile cannibalism to a “counter-cannibalistic,” reactive function. Devereux argues convincingly that the very complexity of the anthrophagic pattern prevents the child from being parontivorous, and that even without the necessity of the cannibalistic know-how puppies and piglets have no apparent appetites for their mothers. In fact, their capacity to react defensively to noxious stimuli from birth on may be speculatively ascribed to their innate fear of oral incorporation by natural enemies including the older members of their own species. (2)
The widespread existence of cannibalism of eggs and young by older individuals can be viewed “not as a strange and exceptional development in eccentric environments among lower organisms, but seemingly as part of the order of things to the organisms themselves.” (1) There are many reports which confirm these general statements by specific examples documenting the practice of cannibalism from the lowest to the highest form of life including that of man. According to Sumner and Keller, “man-eating was once no isolated phenomenon. It has been practiced very widely over the earth [and] there is not a people that has not practiced this custom at some period or other in its history.” (3)
Inferring that the human animal shares with his phylogenetic ancestors the same basic fear of being eaten by the older and stronger (2) and adducing this fear as another circumstantial proof for Devereux's postulate, we must come to terms with the question of why the cannibalistic impulse does not manifest itself before adulthood. I believe that the ans