The foundling hospitals of former times were mere death-traps, with an infant mortality of 60 to 95 per cent. With the advance of medical and educational science, and with the growth of milder views regarding illegitimate sexual relationships, foundling hospitals have been greatly transformed. Turn-tables have for the most part been abolished, so that they remain to-day in a few countries only, and in a few foundling hospitals. Unrestricted and secret reception of infants has been replaced by restricted and public reception; institutional care has given place to external care; natural feeding, wherever possible, is preferred to artificial feeding. By these means, the infant mortality has been greatly diminished, and those children that survive receive a much better upbringing. With the passage of time, the foundling hospitals have come to receive not foundlings (abandoned and exposed children) only, but also other children inadequately cared for by the persons legally responsible (parents, guardians, &c.). The foundling hospitals thus take over the work formerly done by orphan asylums and similar institutions. The children received by a modern institution remain under its roof for a short time only, until foster-parents have been found for them, and return to the institution only in the event of illness. Children that are ill when first received, are boarded out only after they have recovered. The foster-parents are remunerated and subject to inspection. Thus the modern foundling hospital is: 1. A depot for the reception of children; 2. A children’s hospital; 3. The centre for the supervision of the children that are boarded out. The latest phases in the development of the care of foundlings can best be studied in Hungary. In this country the matter has been the subject of recent legislation and regulation, and every child declared by the local authorities to be abandoned or neglected is received into a foundling hospital. There have, of course, been countries and districts in Europe in which such institutions as foundling hospitals never developed, or in which those that did develop soon passed into disuse (for instance, in consequence of the Reformation); here foundlings were cared for in another way. The feudal chiefs, who, as is well known, cared for the poor within the limits of their fief, took over also in such cases the care of foundlings. Owing to the desire for the rapid increase in population characteristic of the dominance of the mercantile system of political economy, foundling hospitals existed transitorily in Protestant countries.