Many of the most bizarre contraceptive measures date from antiquity and involve magical practices and gross superstition. Many odd recommendations can also be found in modern times. William Godwin, for instance, in the early nineteenth century, was not averse to a bit of infanticide (hardly contraceptive but at any rate a form of family planning). He remarked"if the alternative were complete, I had rather such a child should perish in the first hour of its existence, than that a man should spend seventy years of life in a state of misery and vice". In 1838 the idea of systematic infanticide was put forward in all seriousness by another man calling himself "Marcus." In this man's view all babies after the third born into a poor family should be killed during their first sleep by mixing a deadly gas with the air they were breathing. Less drastically, in 1806, Thomas Ewell suggested that couples only copulate in "vessels filled with carbonic acid or azotic gas." This on the grounds that "coition will always be unfruitful unless it be done in pure air." Weinhold recommended the infibulation of poor men, invalids, servants, apprentices, etc. - until they found themselves capable of supporting a wife and children. Noyes and others suggested coitus reservatus as an effective contraceptive measure.