INFANTICIDE AMONG THE MALAGASSY.

BY THE REV. DAVID JONES,

MISSIONARY IN MADAGASCAR.

THE barbarous practice of destroying infants, is one of the most affecting proofs which human crime, in all its diversified forms, ever presents of the entire depravity of our nature, and of the cruel despotism of superstition, when its influence is general and unrestrained; and so deep and universal is the moral injury, of which it is one of the melancholy results, that it has prevailed in almost every age of the world, and every state of society. It was among the first of the bitter fruits tasted by idolatrous communities, after they had departed from the service of the true God, and had worshipped the creature rather than the Creator; as the earliest records that we have of its perpetration, shew it to have been connected with the worship of idols, and inform us that those who followed these abominations, sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and caused their children to pass through fire to Moloch their god.

Infanticide prevails, in the present day, in almost every part of the world under the influence of paganism, but is perpetrated from other causes as well as from a regard to the requirements of imagined insatiate deities. This is the case in China, where the degradation to which the female sex is reduced causes the destruction of female infants to such an extent, that the police carts are said to go round the city of Pekin every morning, for the purpose of

gathering up the dead or living infants that may have been cast into the streets, during the night, by their unfeeling relatives or parents: so it was in the South Sea Islands, where a desire to avoid the trouble of providing for their offspring during the period of infancy, and other inferior motives, prompted to the savage deed. This custom has also long prevailed in the beautiful and extensive island of Madagascar ; but here it was practised solely from the influence of a false and sanguinary creed.

The superstitions of the Malagassy lead them to regard certain days as propitious to every procedure resulting from the events of those days; and other days as the reverse, or unlucky. For an infant to be born on one of the latter days, is considered fatal. The delusive oracle that leads them to suppose a malignant influence prevails on certain days, inculcates the belief that all born on these inauspicious days will be the subjects and agents of that baneful influence through future life; it thus stifles the yearnings of affection, and superinduces a conviction that to spare and nurse the unhappy infants who may enter the world at these periods, would be to cherish sorcerers, the chief agents in inflicting every calamity they fear-not only useless, but dangerous members of society; and that to save the child, would be to nourish a serpent, which might sting and destroy those by whom it had been reared, prove dangerous to the community, and even to the sovereign himself.

On the birth therefore of an infant, the great solicitude of the parents is to know its vintana, or destiny, whether the influence of the day be auspicious or malevolent, This is ascertained by certain rules; but if the parents are ignorant of these, they repair to the Mpanandro,

or astrologers, by whom it is declared, and, having ascertained it from them, if the vintana be favourable, they give free course to the tide of their affectionate feelings towards the object of their tenderness and joy; but if the day on which the child was born be declared unlucky, a change takes place, which nothing but the evidence of indisputable fact could induce us to believe the iron rule of superstition ever would be able to produce: every kindling of affection is suppressed; the heart of the parent throbs with no emotion of tenderness; and the fountain of that sympathy and affection, which springs only in a parent's bosom, is dried up; and the innocent and unconscious babe is regarded as a monster, whom it is meritorious to destroy.

When the vintana is unfavourable, the parents lament bitterly; it is not, however, on account of the loss of their child, but that the infant should have been born on such a day—that they should have been the parents of one who, if suffered to live, would have been an object of general terror, and the curse of all over whom its power might be exercised. By one of the strange anomalies of human nature, even this lamentation is not unfrequently blended with a sort of grateful exultation, that, in the now powerless infant, the future sorcerer has been discovered and destroyed. A most heart-rending scene of this kind was exhibited in 1830: when it was pretended to have been ascertained by the Tangena, (an ordeal used in Madagascar,) that a youth accused of sorcery was addicted to this practice, his own father, with fiendish indignation, dashed out his brains on the spot, declaring that he rejoiced that the sorcerer had been found out, and that he had killed him with his own hands; yet regarding it as his heaviest calamity, and