With great indignation Seneca, Ovid, and Juvenal reproved this barbarity of the Romans.

With the domination of Christianity this custom gradually diminished, and Constantine stopped it altogether, ordering succor to the people too poor to rear their own children.

The old Celts were so jealous of their vigor that they placed their babes on a shield in the river, and regarded those that the waves respected as legitimate and worthy to become members of their clans.

In many of the Oriental countries, where the population is often very excessive and poverty great, the girl babies of the lower classes were destroyed.

At one time the crocodiles, held sacred in the Nile, were given the surplus infants.