way of
early life which these little folks must tread.

The fact that so many babies do so well on such unscientific feeding
only serves to demonstrate the old law of "the survival of the
fittest"--they are born in the world with an enormous endowment of
"survival qualities"--and in many cases the little fellows thrive and
grow no matter how atrociously they are fed.

There may be other factors in the explanation of why some babies do so
well on such poor care, but heredity is the chief explanation, while
adaptation is the other. If the little fellows can survive for a few
weeks or a few months, the human machine possesses marvelous powers of
adaptation, and we find here the explanation why many a neglected baby
pulls through.

INFANT FOODS

Rickets and scurvy have so often followed the prolonged use of the
so-called "infant foods" which have flooded the market for the past
decade, that intelligent physicians unanimously agree that they are
injurious and quite unfit for continued use in the feeding of infants.
If they are prescribed to replace milk during an acute illness, or at
other times when the fats and proteins should be withheld for a short
period, both the physician and the mother should be in the possession
of definite and exact knowledge as to just what they do and do not
contain. To provide such knowledge, we present the analysis (Holt) of
some of the more commonly used infant foods.

1. _The Milk Foods._ Nestle's Food is perhaps the most widely known.
The others closely resembling it in composition are the Anglo-Swiss,
the Franco-Swiss, the American-Swiss, and Gerber's Food. These foods
are essentially sweetened, condensed milk evaporated to dryness, with
the addition of some form of flour which has been dextrinized; they
all contain a large proportion of unchanged starch.

2. _The Liebig or Malted Foods._ Mellin's Food may be taken as a type
of the class. Others which resemble it more or less closely are
Liebig's, Horlick's Food, Hawley's Food, malted milk, and cereal milk.
Mellin's food is composed principally (eighty per cent) of soluble
carbohydrates. They are derived from malted wheat and barley flour,
and are composed chiefly of a mixture of dextrins, dextrose, and
maltose.

3. _The Farinaceous Foods._ These are Imperial Granum, Ridge's Food,
Hubbell's Prepared Wheat, and Robinson's Patent Barley. The first
consists of wheat flour previously prepared by baking, by which a
small proportion o