proportion
of deaths under the age of one year among hand-fed infants than among
those brought up at the breast. Foundling hospitals on the Continent, in
which the children are all drawn from the same class, and subjected in
all respects to a similar treatment, except that in some they are fed at
the breast, in others brought up by hand, show a mortality in the latter
case exactly double of that in the former.

It is as idle to ignore these facts, and to adduce in their disproof the
case of some child brought up most successfully by hand, as it would be
to deny that a battle-field was a place of danger because some people
had been present there and had come away unwounded.

But it is always well not merely to accept a fact, but also to know the
reason why a thing is so. The reason is twofold: partly because the
different substitutes for the mother's milk, taken for the most part
from the vegetable kingdom, are less easy of digestion than the milk,
and partly because, even were they digested with the same facility, they
do not furnish the elements necessary to support life in due proportion.

All food has to answer two distinct purposes: the one to furnish
materials for the growth of the body, the other to afford matter for the
maintenance of its temperature; and life cannot be supported except on a
diet in which the elements of nutrition and those of respiration bear a
certain proportion to each other. Now, in milk, the proper food of
infants, the elements of the former are to those of the latter about in
the proportion of 1 to 2, while in arrowroot, sago, and tapioca they are
only as 1 to 26, and in wheaten flour only as 1 to 7. If to this we add
the absence in these substances of the oleaginous matters which the milk
contributes to supply the body with fat, and the smaller quantity, and
to a certain extent the different kind, of the salts which they contain,
it becomes apparent that by such a diet the health if not the life of
the infant must almost inevitably be sacrificed.

But these substances are not only less nutritious, they are also less
easy of digestion than the infant's natural food. We all know how
complex is the digestive apparatus of the herbivorous animal, of which
the four stomachs of the ruminants are an instance, and how large is the
bulk of food in proportion to his size which the elephant requires,
compared with that which suffices for the lion or the tiger.

The stomach of the infant is the sim