Among the Romans several modern writers appear to suppose the existence of more humane feelings, for which it would certainly have been difficult to account. An ancient law attributed to Romulus has misled them. By this it was enacted that no male child should be exposed; and that of daughters the first should be permitted to live, while the others having been brought up till they were three years old, might then if judged expedient be destroyed.[366] The legislator, it is argued, knew human nature too well to fear that parents who had preserved their children three years would after that take away their lives. But infants exceedingly mutilated or deformed might be killed at once, having first been shown to five neighbours, and these neighbours, like the overseers of murder at Lacedæmon, were probably lax in interpreting the law, which, acknowledging the principle, would easily tolerate variations in the practice.[367] Be this, however, as it may, child-murder and child dropping were in imperial times of ordinary occurrence at Rome. There was in the Herb-market a pillar called the “Milky column,”[368] whither foundlings were brought to be suckled by public nurses, or to be fed with milk—for the passage in Festus may be both ways interpreted, and their numbers would seem to have been considerable. The Christian writers constantly object the practice of infanticide to the Romans. “You cast forth your sons,” says Tertullian,[369] “to be picked up and nourished by the first woman that passes.” And the poor, as Ambrose remarks, would desert and expose their little ones, and if caught deny them to be theirs.[370] Others adopted more decisive measures, and instead of exposing strangled them.[371] Probably, moreover, it was the atrocious device of legislators to get rid of their superabundant population that gave rise to the rite of child-sacrificing known to have prevailed among the Phœnicians, who passed their children through fire to Moloch; and among their descendants the Carthaginians,[372] who offered up infants to their gods, as at the present day our own idolatrous subjects in the East cast forth their first-born infants on islands at the mouth of the Ganges, to be devoured by the alligators. In China Christianity has performed for infancy the same humane duty as in ancient Rome, as many of the converts made by the Jesuits consisted of foundlings whom they had picked up when cast forth by their parents to perish in the streets. Footnote 366: Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. i. 81; ii. 15. Footnote 367: Seneca, de Irâ, l. i. Apuleius Metam. x. where a husband gives command for the destruction of his daughter immediately on her birth.—Ap. Lips. Epist. ad Belgas, Cent. i. p. 818. seq. Footnote 368: Fest. v. Lactaria Columna. Footnote 369: Apolog. c. 9. Footnote 370: Hexæm. l. v. c. 18. Footnote 371: Arnob. cont. Gent. viii. Lactant. Instit. vi. 20. ap. Lips. Epist. ad Belg. 819. Footnote 372: