FOUNDLING HOSPITALS

In those ancient nations with the details of whose social life we are acquainted, the practice of exposing new-born infants seems to have heen, as it is at this day in China, a species of legitimate infanticide. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor in general any political wri ters of antiquity, condemn it; they merely profe to lay down rules for the preservation of the healthier and stronger, at the expense of the more weakly. Among the Greeks, a more tender mother chose the market-place, or some temple, for the exposure of her child, in order to have ihe chance of some charitable hand succouring it: if its death was desired, it was abandoned in solitary places; and their dramas and romances are full of narratives in which this custom forms the foundation of the interest. Thebes, in republican Greece, is the only state in which the exposure, of children is known to have been forbidden by law. The practice of exposure [s. 488]