According to this reasoning a child is not known to be a human being till some time after its birth. And this is not uttered by some speculative philosopher in his closet, but by a medical practitioner on his daily rounds, tools in hand, as it were, to carry out his theory and break the skulls of any and all luckless babes that may come in his way in the exercise of what he calls his legitimate practice. How long after birth the child remains without becoming a human being, he does not pretend to know; they remain non-human till they manifest mental action. Till then, not being human, he assigns them no human rights--no rights at all which we are conscientiously obliged to respect. Herod may have been right after all when he appointed the term of two years old and under as the limit of the butchery at Bethlehem. The writer pretends to lessen the horror inspired by his theory by referring to some restrictions of canon law. But what do he and his like care about canon law? He would be the first to scout the idea of letting canon law limit his freedom of action and speculation. What would be the real results in practical life if we were to accept as rules of conduct these rash theories of agnostic philosophers and infidel scientists? Justly does the writer proceed to say: "I am well aware that the idea arouses antagonism and inflammatory denunciation in some minds." Certainly it does. He adds: "That it [the idea] will prove to be the true one, however, depends only on the truth of the general theory of development." If this be the logical consequence of evolution, or Darwinism, as he calls it, then all the worse for Darwinism. Society cannot get along on a theory that begets such principles of action; the more so since, in Spencer's and in Darwin's system, the human soul, even in grown persons, is only a material modification of the body and perishes with it in death. Hence there would be no responsibility after death. On this theory the physician is only a lump of very curiously evolved matter; he, too, like the embryo, is without an immortal soul, is not a free being, and therefore is incapable of having rights or duties.