Seneca, who certainly always writes with propriety and aims to be governed by reason, in his treatise on Anger (De Ira: i., 15), comments thus calmly on the practice: "Portentos foetus extingnimus; liberos quoque si debiles, monstrosique editi sunt, mergimus. Non ira, sed _ratio_ est, a sanis, inutilia secernere." (Monstrous offspring we destroy; children too, if weak and unnaturally formed from birth, we drown. It is not anger, but reason, thus to separate the useless from the sound.) In another work (Controversi, lib. v., 33), he denounces the horrible practice, common in Rome, of maiming these unfortunate children and then offering them to the gaze of the compassionate. He describes the miserable little creatures with shortened limbs, broken Joints, and carved backs, exhibited by the villainous beggars who had gathered them at the _Lactaria,_ and then deformed them: "Volo nosse," "I should like to know" says the moralist, with a burst of human indignation, "illam calamitatum humanarum officinam--illud infantum spoliarium!"--"that workshop of human misfortunes--those shambles of infants!" On the day that Germanicus died, says Suetonius (in Calig., n. 5), "Subversae Deam arae, partus conjugum expositi," parents exposed their new-born babes. The early Christian preachers and writers were unceasing in their denunciations of the practice. Quintilian (Decl. 306, vol vi., p. 236) draws a most moving picture of the fate of these unhappy children left in the Forum: "Rarum est ut expositi vivant! Yos ponite ante oculos puerum statim neglectum * * * inter feras et volucres." "It is rare that the exposed survive!" he says. Tertullian, in an eloquent passage (Apol., c. 9), asks: "Quot vultis ex his circumstantibus et in christianum sanguinem hiantibus * * * apud conscientias pulsem, qui natos sibi liberos enecent?" "How many, do you suppose, of those standing about and panting for the blood of Christians, if I should put it to them before their very conscience, would deny that they killed their own children?" Lactantius, who was the tutor of the son of Constantine, in a book dedicated to Constantine, protests: "It is impossible to grant that one has the right to strangle one's new-born children"; and speaks of exposition as exposing one's own blood--"ad servitutem vel ad lupanar"--"for slavery or the brothel." "It is a crime as execrable to expose a child as to kill him." So fearfully did the numbers increase, under the Roman Empire, of these unfortunate children, that the spark of charity, which is never utterly extinguished in the human breast, began to kindle. Pliny the Younger is said to have appropriated a sum equivalent to $52,000 (see Epist., v., 7), to found an asylum for fathers unable to support their children. THE FIRST CHILDREN'S ASYLUM.