Some of the Christian missionaries, in their accounts of this country, have attempted to palliate the unnatural act of exposing infants, by attributing it to the midwife, who they pretend to say, from knowing the circumstances of the parents, strangle the child without the knowledge of the mother, telling her that the infant was still-born. Others have ascribed the practice to a belief in the metempsycosis, or transmigration of souls into other bodies, that the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it is better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum, than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. No degree of superstition, one would imagine, could prevail upon a parent to reason thus, in that most anxious and critical moment when the combined efforts of hope and fear, of exquisite joy and severe pain, agitate by turns the mother's breast. Besides, the Chinese trouble themselves very little with superstitious notions, unless where they apprehend some personal danger. Nor is it more probable that the midwife should take upon herself the commission of a concealed and voluntary murder of an innocent and helpless infant, for the sake of sparing those feelings in another, of which the supposition implies she could not possibly partake; and if she should be encouraged by the father, whose affections for an infant child may be more gradually unfolded than the mother's, to perpetrate so horrid an act, we must allow that to the evidence of unnatural and murtherous parents must be added that of hired ruffians; so that Chinese virtue would gain little by such a supposition. It is much more probable that extreme poverty and hopeless indigence, the frequent experience of direful famines, and the scenes of misery and calamity occasioned by them, acting on minds whose affections are not very powerful, induce this unnatural crime which common custom has encouraged, and which is not prohibited by positive law. That this is the case, and that future advantages are not overlooked, will appear from the circumstance of almost all the infants that are exposed being females, who are the least able to provide for themselves, and the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of the enormity of crimes.