It may still be a puzzle to many, how beings should be born into the world whose organization is such that they unavoidably, even in a civilized country, become malefactors. Does God, it may be asked, make criminals? Does he fashion certain beings with a predestination to evil? He does not do so; and yet the criminal type of brain, as it is called, comes into existence in accordance with laws which the Deity has established. It is not, however, as the result of the first or general intention of those laws, but as an exception from their ordinary and proper action. The production of those evilly disposed beings is in this manner. The moral character of the progeny depends in a general way, (as does the physical character also,) upon conditions of the parents,—both general conditions, and conditions at the particular time of the commencement of the existence of the new being, and likewise external conditions affecting the fœtus through the mother. Now the amount of these conditions is indefinite. The faculties of the parents, as far as these are concerned, may have oscillated for the time towards the extreme of tensibility in one direction. The influences upon the fœtus may have also been of an extreme and unusual kind. Let us suppose that the conditions upon the whole have been favourable for the development, not of the higher, but of the lower sentiments, and of the propensities of the new being, the result will necessarily be a mean type of brain. Here, it will be observed, God no more decreed an immoral being, than he decreed an immoral paroxysm of the sentiments. Our perplexity is in considering the ill-disposed being by himself. He is only a part of a series of phenomena, traceable to a principle good in the main, but which admits of evil as an exception. We have seen that it is for wise ends that God leaves our moral faculties to an indefinite range of action; the general good results of this arrangement are obvious; but exceptions of evil are inseparable from such a system, and this is one of them. To come to particular illustration—when a people are oppressed, or kept in a state of slavery, they invariably contract habits of lying, for the purpose of deceiving and outwitting their superiors, falsehood being a refuge of the weak under difficulties. What is a habit in parents becomes an inherent quality in children. We are not, therefore, to be surprised when a traveller tells us that black children in the West Indies appear to lie by instinct, and never answer a white person truly even in the simplest matter. Here we have secretiveness roused in a people to a state of constant and exalted exercise; an over tendency of the nervous energy in that direction is the consequence, and a new organic condition is established. This tells upon the progeny, which comes into the world with secretiveness excessive in volume and activity. All other evil characteristics may be readily conceived as being