xperience that the magnitude of results
was often in an inverse ratio to the means employed, more especially
when applied in due season.

Soon I discovered that many of the maladies incident to children, to
youth, and to adults, owed their origin to the neglect and injudicious
treatment of the infant. I had seen numbers of interesting children,
with handsome features and well-formed limbs, who in their riper years
had become ugly, with ill-favoured features, sallow complexions, bad
expressions of countenance, misshapen forms, and crooked limbs. Many who
in early years had displayed great intelligence had become positively
stupid. It was not that the intelligence had been prematurely developed,
but that the organization had been prematurely injured, and the
brain-machine rendered incapable of giving proper expression to the
yearnings of the soul. None suffered more keenly from early physical
neglect than children of genius.

Satisfied that my observations were accurate, and that everything
contributing to husband the health, strength, beauty, and intelligence
of the child, would likewise contribute to the beauty, happiness, and
contentment of the adult, as well as his obedience to my laws, I
resolved to occupy myself with what proved to be the very important
subject of babies. In meditating on the mode of obtaining the desired
results, I considered nothing too insignificant,--not even so "small" a
thing as the scratch of a pin, sufficient at all events to make an
infant cry. The acts of crying and making wry faces disturb the lines of
the plastic clay of the child's countenance, and even the lines of the
form. The state of suffering calls off the vital electricity from its
duties in other parts of the organisation, and is attended with other
inconveniences, slight indeed in immediate perceptible effects, but so
powerful in their cumulative and germinating effects as to lead to
results which, were they related, would seem incredible.

I must content myself by saying, that although the march of these
cumulative effects is not one-tenth as visible as the almost
imperceptible movement of the hand that marks the seconds in one of our
smallest electrical watches, they nevertheless eventually show in their
result great and increasing evils, seriously affecting the child, the
youth, the adult, and the man. It would not be too much to say that the
traces of an injury, however slight, are never altogether obliterated,
whilst ev