A niece of Domitian is said to have died in consequence of having, at the command of the emperor, practised it (Sueton. _Domit._ xxii.). Plutarch notices the custom (_De Sanitate tuenda_), and Seneca eulogises Helvia (_Ad Helv._ xvi.) for being exempt from vanity and having never destroyed her unborn offspring. Favorinus, in a remarkable passage (Aulus Gellius, _Noct. Att._ xii. 1), speaks of the act as “publica detestatione communique odio dignum,” and proceeds to argue that it is only a degree less criminal for mothers to put out their children to nurse. Juvenal has some well-known and emphatic lines on the subject:— “Sed jacet aurato vix ulla puerpera lecto; Tantum artes hujus, tantum medicamina possunt, Quæ steriles facit, atque homines in ventre necandos Conducit.” _Sat._ vi. 592-595. There are also many allusions to it in the Christian writers. Thus Minucius Felix (_Octavius_, xxx.): “Vos enim video procreatos filios nunc feris et avibus exponere, nunc adstrangulatos misero mortis genere elidere. Sunt quæ in ipsis visceribus, medicaminibus epotis, originem futuri hominis extinguant, et parricidium faciant antequam pariant.” 18 See Labourt, _Recherches sur les Enfans trouvés_, p. 25. 19 Among the barbarian laws there is a very curious one about a daily compensation for children who had been killed in the womb on account of the daily suffering of those children in hell. “Propterea diuturnam judicaverunt antecessores nostri compositionem et judices postquam religio Christianitatis inolevit in mundo. Quia diuturnam postquam incarnationem suscepit anima, quamvis ad nativitatis lucem minima pervenisset, patitur pœnam, quia sine sacramento regenerationis abortivo modo tradita est ad inferos.”—_Leges Bajuvariorum_, tit. vii. cap. xx. in Canciani, _Leges Barbar._ vol. ii. p. 374. The first foundling hospital of which we have undoubted record is that founded at Milan, by a man named Datheus, in A.D. 789. Muratori has preserved (_Antich. Ital._ Diss. xxxvii.) the charter embodying the motives of the founder, in which the following sentences occur: “Quia frequenter per luxuriam hominum genus decipitur, et exinde malum homicidii generatur, dum concipientes ex adulterio, ne prodantur in publico, fetos teneros necant, _et absque baptismatis lavacro parvulos ad Tartara mittunt_, quia nullum reperiunt locum, quo servare vivos valeant,” &c. Henry II. of France, 1556, made a long law against women who, “advenant le temps de leur part et délivrance de leur enfant, occultement s’en délivrent, puis le suffoquent et autrement suppriment _sans leur avoir fait empartir le Saint Sacrement du Baptême_.”—Labourt, _Recherches sur les Enfans trouvés_, p. 47. There is a story told of