Human life furnishes motives for cult acts in its origin as in its decline, in birth and in death. Other motives are to be found in significant intervening events, such primarily as the entrance of the youth into manhood, though in the case of the maiden, ceremonies of this sort are very secondary or are entirely lacking. Of these most important events of life, that of birth is practically removed from present consideration. No ceremony or cult is connected with it. Not infrequently, however, the idea prevails that the child becomes capable of life only on condition that its parents endow it with life a second time, as it were, by an express act of will. Thus, many Polynesian tribes allow parents to put to death a new-born infant. Only after the child has lived several hours has it gained a right to existence and does the duty of rearing it devolve upon the parents. There is a survival of similar ideas in the older usages of cultural peoples, though they have not led to the widespread evils of infanticide as they have among many peoples of nature. But even among the early Germans, Romans, and Greeks, the life of a new-born child was secure only after the father had given recognition to it in a symbolical act--such, for example, as lifting it from the earth. On the other hand, the previous act of laying the child on the ground frequently came to be symbolical of the idea that it, as all living things, owes its existence primarily to mother earth. With this act of an express recognition of the child, moreover, there is also bound up the unconditional obedience which the child, even down to a late period, was held to owe to its parents.