loud cry, suffering or
passionate as the case may be, and the less loud back draught of
inspiration. The French have two words for these two sounds--the _cri_
and the _reprise_. The _cri_ is feeble, the _reprise_ is altogether
wanting wherever expansion of the lung has to any considerable extent
failed to take place, and you would hail this second sound as the best
proof of an improvement in the child's condition.

If you watch the child with a little attention you will see that while
the chest moves up and down, it is very little, if at all, dilated by
the respiratory movements. The temperature falls, the skin becomes pale,
and the lips grow livid, and often slight twitching is observed about
the muscles of the face. The difficulty in sucking increases, the cry
grows weaker and more whimpering, or even altogether inaudible, while
breathing is attended with a slight rattle or a feeble cough, and the
convulsive movements return more frequently, and are no longer confined
to the face, but affect also the muscles of the extremities. Any sudden
movement suffices to bring on these convulsive seizures, but even while
perfectly still the child's condition is not uniform, but it will
suddenly become convulsed, and during this seizure the respiration will
be extremely difficult, and death will seem momentarily impending. In a
few minutes, however, all this disturbance ceases, and the extreme
weakness of the child, its inability to suck, its feeble cry, and its
frequent and imperfect inspirations, are the only abiding indications of
the serious disorder from which it suffers. But the other symptoms
return again and again, until after the lapse of a few days or a few
weeks the infant dies.

I have dwelt at some length on this condition because it is important to
know that during the first few weeks of life real inflammation of the
lungs or air-tubes is of extremely rare occurrence, and that the
symptoms which are not infrequently supposed to depend on it are really
due to a portion of the lung more or less extensive never having been
called into proper activity. I may add that we shall hereafter have to
notice a similar condition of the lung--its collapse after having once
been inflated--as occurring sometimes in the course of real inflammation
of the organs of respiration in early life, and forming a very serious
complication of the original disease.

If the collapse of the lung is not so considerable as to destroy life
within