In India, we meet with the Bidhata-Purusha, a "deity that predestines all the events of the life of man or woman, and writes on the forehead of the child, on the sixth day of its birth, a brief precis of them" (426. 9). India is _par excellence_ the land of caste, but other lands know the system that makes the man follow in his father's footsteps, and often ignores the woman altogether, not even counting her in the census of the people, as was formerly the case even in Japan and China, where a girl was not worthy to be counted beside the son. Of ancient Peru, Letourneau says: "Every male inherited his father's profession; he was not allowed to choose another employment. By right of birth a man was either labourer, miner, artisan, or soldier" (100. 486). Predestination of state and condition in another world is a common theological tenet, predestination of state and condition in this world is a common social theory. Vast indeed is the lore of birth-days, months and years, seasons and skies--the fictions, myths, and beliefs of the astrologist, the spiritualist, the fortune-teller, and the almanac-maker--which we have inherited from those ancestors of ours, who believed in the kinship of all things, who thought that in some way "beasts and birds, trees and plants, the sea, the mountains, the wind, the sun, the moon, the clouds, and the stars, day and night, the heaven and the earth, were alive and possessed of the passions and the will they felt within themselves" (258. 25). Here belongs a large amount of folk-lore and folk-speech relating to the defective, delinquent, and dependent members of human society, whose misfortunes or misdeeds are assigned to atavistic causes, to demoniacal influences. _Parenthood._ Among primitive peoples, the advent of a child, besides entailing upon one or both of the parents ceremonies and superstitious performances whose name and fashion are legion, often makes a great change in the constitution of society. Motherhood and fatherhood are, in more than one part of the globe, primitive titles of nobility and badges of aristocracy. With the birth of a child, the Chinese woman becomes something more than a mere slave and plaything, and in the councils of uncivilized peoples (as with us to-day) the voice of the father of a family carries more weight than that of the childless. With the civilized races to-day, more marriages mean fewer prison-houses, and more empty jails, than in the earlier days, and with the primitive peoples of the present, this social bond was the salvation of the tribe to the same extent and in the same way.