nimal food, and take more exercise in the open air.
Oatmeal gruel enjoys a reputation for increasing the flow of milk. A
basin of it sometimes produces an immediate effect. The same is true of
cow's milk. Porter or ale once or twice a day, in those with reduced
systems and impaired digestion and appetite, will be found useful.
Anise, fennel, and caraway-seeds, given in soup, act sometimes as
stimulants upon the secretion of milk. The application of a poultice
made from the pulverized leaves of the castor-oil plant is a most
efficient remedy when milk fails to make its appearance in the breast in
sufficient quantity after confinement.

WET-NURSING BY VIRGINS, AGED WOMEN, AND MEN.

As a rule, the secretion of milk is limited to one sex, and in that is
confined to a short period after childbirth. But there are many cases on
record of the flowing of milk in women not recently mothers, in girls
before the age of puberty, in aged women, and even in individuals of the
male sex. In such instances, the secretion is induced by the combined
influence, acting through the nervous system, of a strong desire for its
occurrence, of a fixed attention towards the mammary glands, and of
suction from the nipples.

Travellers among savage nations report many examples of such unnatural
nursing. Dr. Livingstone says he has frequently seen in Africa a
grandchild suckled by a grandmother. Dr. Wm. A. Gillespie, of Virginia
records, in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, the case of a
widow, aged about sixty, whose daughter having died, leaving a child two
months old, took the child and tried to raise it by feeding. The child's
bowels became deranged, and being unable to procure a nurse, and her
breasts being large and full, he advised her to apply the child, in hopes
milk would come. She followed his advice perseveringly, and, to her
astonishment, a plentiful secretion of milk was the result, with which
she nourished the child, which afterwards became strong and healthy. A
similar instance, still more remarkable, is recorded of a woman at
seventy years, who twenty years wet-nursed a grandchild after her last
confinement.

Cases of nursing in the opposite extreme of life are also well
authenticated. The distinguished French physician Baudelocque has
related that of a deaf and dumb girl, eight years old, who, by the
repeated application to her breast of a young infant, which her mother
was suckling, had sufficient milk to nourish the