Note 79 — Chapter V
Reading edition
Yet notwithstanding that we refuse credit to these particular narrations of Quiñones and Fajardo, acts of cannibalism may certainly have been perpetrated by the Gitános of Spain in ancient times, when they were for the most part semi-savages living amongst mountains and deserts, where food was hard to be procured: famine may have occasionally compelled them to prey on human flesh, as it has in modern times compelled people far more civilised than wandering Gypsies.