further investigation, the number of the latter was sometimes found yet less in comparison with the former. There is no religious obligation to perpetrate the crime; the will of the father is the arbitrator of life and death; and he is usually actuated by the sole consideration of the means he has to support his offspring. But it is rare to find more than one daughter in a family. The first-born, though not a son, may be preserved, because the parents are not sure of further progeny; but very frequently every female infant is destroyed.

The practice is acknowledged without hesitation, and the reason given for it by the people is, that they are unable to maintain women, who cannot work in the fields, or take part in war, or in the chase. The infant is put to death soon after birth, usually by being thrown into the nearest ravine, where she is devoured by vultures and jackals. If the little innocent is allowed to live for a few weeks, she escapes this more than brutal exposure. But yet she is not safe. The parent assumes, that he may do what he pleases with his own children; and, in the exercise of this prerogative, sometimes sells his daughter at a more advanced age of childhood, to be bred up a victim for human sacrifice.

The result is, that the female population falls far short of the male, and wives are sought from other tribes and countries. The bride is sometimes purchased, and sometimes carried off by force. She is taken from among a people who cherish infancy with natural tenderness: she has been brought up in habits that do not quench all natural affection: and the violation of a mother's feelings in the destruction of her progeny must be a greater cruelty to her, than to the infant who is exposed. The very beasts and birds, that tear the little limbs, and devour the body of her child, exhibit the force of natural attachment operating as an instinct upon the tigress in her lair, and the pelican tearing her breast for her brood. If there is an affection planted by nature in the heart if there is a passionate fondness that burns unbidden in the human breast—if there is a duty indicated by all that love can prompt, and all that pity can plead -it is a mother's love for her own offspring. In savage man there is not indeed the acuteness of sensation, either of joy or pain, that is sharpened into so keen an edge by cultivation and refinement. But there is a tie between her who gives birth, and her who is born,

which seems indissoluble. That mysterious regard, which is said, during the Revolution of the last century in France, to have absorbed all the anxieties of one, who feared she should not become a mother, ere the guillotine had rendered her a corpse, cannot utterly be extinguished by any degradation of intelligence, or the enforcement of the most inhuman habitudes.

There is a passage quoted by Colonel Walker from the preliminary discourse of Sale's Koran, which is of too much interest to be omitted here. It states, that "the law of Mahomed also put a stop to the inhuman custom, which had been long practised by the pagan Arabs, of burying their daughters alive .... The manner of destroying them is differently related. Some say, that when an Arab had a daughter born, and he intended to bring her up, he sent her clothed in a garment of wool or hair to keep camels or sheep in the desert: but if he designed to put her to death, he let her live till she became six years old, and then said to her mother: Perfume her and adorn her that I may carry her to her mothers.' Which being done the father led her to a well or pit dug for that purpose, and bidding her

look down, pushed her it into it headlong, as he stood behind her; and then filling up the pit levelled it with the rest of the ground.

"The Arabs in the murder of their children were far from being singular, the practice of exposing infants, and putting them to death being so common among the ancients, that it is remarked as a very extraordinary thing in the Egyptians, that they brought up all their children and by the laws of Lycurgus no child was allowed to be brought up, without the approbation of public officers."

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Christianity," said Mr. Wilberforce in 1813, "may justly glory in the acknowledgment of one of its greatest adversaries, that infanticide was the crime of all heathen antiquity." Infants being exposed is a subject familiar to the most casual reader of history. Moses and Romulus, the Amazons, the legislation of Greece, the Republic of Plato, and the Philosophy of Aristotle, as well as the fires of Moloch, attest the inhuman practices of earlier times. Robertson speaks of child-murder in America; Mr. Collins in New South Wales; Sir John Chardin among the Tartars; Sir George Staunton, and the Jesuits in China. It existed in Otaheite in the time of Captain Cook. It has been ascertained to have been

practised continually and systematically in India; and, with the never-failing inconsist ency of heathen morality, those who would not shed the blood of a brute beast, and, in their tenderness, provided sustenance for insects, participated in, or permitted, the daily murder of their own offspring.

It is difficult to overcome the inveteracy of established custom and prejudice on the one hand, and, on the other, to stir the cautious and tardy exertions of a government so deferential to local opinion, as that of the British empire in the East. A growing interest in the well-being of the natives, as well as a growing conviction, that the security of our Indian possessions will be enhanced by establishing a common sense of morality, has roused the efforts of individuals: but superior authorities have not been so easily moved to support benevolence, which is in advance of them, and have perhaps been afraid of involving themselves in new conflicts, and of being compromised by further expenditure of the public reTo the church of this country, as a religious body, and to every member of it, as a sincere Christian, it cannot but be a matter of deepest interest, if not of shame and selfreproach, that their fellow-subjects of the same

venues.