Chinese law strongly supports the sanctity of the home and is very severe on unfaithful wives, but it regards the killing of an illegitimate child as a very light offence,--indeed case-made law regards it as no offence at all provided the killing be done at the time of the child's birth or before it. Fortunately cases of this kind in Weihaiwei are very rare. But the poorest classes have one most objectionable custom which seems to be strangely inconsistent with the undoubted fondness of parents for their children. This is the practice of throwing away or exposing the bodies of children who have died in infancy or in very early childhood. This seems to indicate an extraordinary degree of callousness in the natures of the people. How a mother can fondle her child lovingly and watch over it with the utmost care and unselfishness when it is sick, and yet can bear to see its little body thrown into an open ditch or left on a hillside to become the prey of wolves or the village dogs, is perhaps one of those mysterious anomalies in which the Chinese character is said to abound. Even New Guinea babies are treated after death with more respect than is sometimes the case in China.[186] Needless to say the British Government has not remained inactive in the matter, and the man who now refrains from giving his infant child decent burial knows that he runs a risk of punishment. The only excuses that can be made for the people in this respect are not based on their poverty (for poverty does not prevent them from burying their adult relatives with all proper decorum) but on their theory that an infant "does not count" in the scheme of family and ancestral relationships. No mourning of any kind is worn for children who die under the age of about eight, and only a minor degree of mourning for older children who die unmarried and unmarriageable. Even when a young child's body is given a place in the family burial-ground care is always taken to choose a grave-site that is not likely to be selected for the burial of any senior,[187] for it is considered foolish and unnecessary to waste good _fêng-shui_ on a mere child, who has left no descendants whose fortunes it can influence. Young children are not indeed regarded as soulless,[188] for there are touching ceremonies whereby a mother seeks to recall the soul of her child when it seems likely to fly away for ever; but child-spirits are not supposed to exercise any control over the welfare of the family. They never "grow up" in the spirit-world, but merely remain infant ghosts, powerful in nothing. The ancestral temples preserve no records of dead children nor are their names inscribed on spirit tablets. This is very different from the state of things existing among a race that is ethnically far inferior to the Chinese, namely the Vaeddas of Ceylon, who pay special attention to "the shades of departed children, the 'infant spirits,'"[189] and often call upon them for aid in times of unhappiness or calamity.