To begin with the earliest event in life. If a child, on its appearance in the world, appears to be in any way defective, its mother quietly kills it and deposits its body in the forest. If the mother dies in childbirth the child, unless someone takes pity on it and adopts it, is killed by the father, who, it may be presumed, is indisposed to take the trouble, perhaps indeed incapable of doing so, of rearing the motherless babe. That the child, in any case, immediately after birth, is plunged into cold water, is not perhaps a conscious method of eliminating the weak, though it must operate in that direction. At a later period of life should any disease believed to be infectious break out in a tribe, "those attacked by it are immediately left, even by their closest relatives, the house is abandoned, and possibly even burnt. Such derelict houses are no uncommon sight in the forest, grimly desolate mementoes of possible tragedies." When a person becomes insane, he is first of all exorcised by the medicine man, and if that fails is put to death by poison by the same functionary. The sick are dealt with on similar lines, unless there is or seems to be a probability of speedy recovery. "Cases of chronic illness meet with no sympathy from the Indians. A man who cannot hunt or fight is regarded as useless, he is merely a burden on the community." Under these circumstances he is either left at home untended or hunted out into the bush to die, or his end is accelerated by the medicine man. The same fate awaits the aged, unless they seem to be of value to the tribe on account of their wisdom and experience. All these things placed together give us a perfect picture of life under Natural Selection, and having studied it we may fairly ask whether such a rule of life is one under which any one of us would like to live. In every respect it is the antipodes of the Christian rule of life, and of that rule of life which civilised countries, whether in fact Christian or not, have derived from Christianity and still practise. The non-Christian rule of the Indians is one under which might is right and no real individual liberty exists, all personal rights being sacrificed to the supposed needs and benefit of the community. So much from the point of view of Natural Selection, but it would appear that those who have given up that factor as of anything but a very minor value, if even that, have also their rule of life founded on their interpretation of Nature. Thus Professor Bateson, the great exponent of Mendel's doctrines, who has told us in his Presidential Address to the British Association that we must think much less highly of Natural Selection than some would have us do, has, as has been set forth in the previous section of this essay, his opinion as to the rule of life which we should follow.