its fingers, and then crying from disappointment, it should be permitted to suck some healthy woman with a good breast of milk. It is almost superfluous to observe that the younger such milk may be, the more salubrious it must prove for so young an infant. And if it should be impossible to find a woman with convenience who could give it the breast, it may be fed with a little good cow's milk, diluted with nearly half water, and rendered palatable with sugar. After this first craving is allayed, the child will fall asleep, and afterwards be perfectly satisfied with what it can obtain from its mother. Too much food occasions acidities and griping in such young children; oftener the cause of their crying, and infinitely more hurtful to them than the temporary want of food they may feel previous to the full flowing of the milk, even allowing that they do feel such want, which I believe rarely happens, provided they are permitted to suck as often as they show a disposition to do so. Here, I Here, I suppose, I shall have the disciples of the late Dr. Hugh Smith to combat. Through a mistaken complaisance to ladies

of over refined delicacy, and with a laudable wish to persuade them that they may possibly undergo the fatigue of nursing their own children, that gentleman has attempted to prove, in his letters to married women, that the meals of an infant may be regulated like those of adults, and that if they are suffered to suck four or five times in four and twenty hours, it is sufficient. I will not say this cannot be done, but I will say I would not for any consideration undertake to bring up a little babe from the birth so hampered. I have often been vexed with physicians who, while they exhort us to follow nature, from a misplaced indulgence to the prevailing fastidiousness of the age, adopt the absurd notion that a mother cannot endure the fatigue of suckling her own child. This may be the case in some few instances. Such unhappy mothers are to be pitied, but I greatly fear the far greater number who neglect this sweet endearing office are more fit objects of censure than pity.

Any woman, how delicate soever her education and habits, who is capable of becoming the mother of a child, may nurse it if

she pleases, unless prevented by illness; and indeed she whom education has rendered thus delicate is doubly reprehensible for neglecting this prime maternal duty; as it is to be presumed Providence has given her the means of providing herself every assistance necessary, and every indulgence even to superfluity.

How ungrateful to that benign Providence, thus to turn the greatest blessings into evils the most lamentable, and by giving way to a sickly delicacy, and fashions and opinions totally repugnant to the finest feelings of the soul, cast from her fostering bosom the sweet pledge of her heart's best affections, and expose it to sickness and sorrow, if not to death.

"But you whose hearts with gentle pity warm, "Pure joys can please and genuine pleasures charm, "Clasp your fair nurslings to your breasts of snow "And give the sweet salubrious streams to flow; "Let kind affections sway without control,

"And through the milk-streams pour the feeling soul."

But to return to my subject: as it is above every thing desirable to keep the infant

quiet, both because crying is the occasion of ruptures in such young children, and that the mother and babe mutually require rest, it may be better to feed it occasionally with the milk and water rather than let it complain for want of food; but do not on any account suffer your attendants to cram its little stomach with pap, or any other thick food. I shall here beg leave to insert an extract from a work I have read with great benefit and pleasure. Speaking of the great folly of feeding infants with what the author calls "thick victuals," he says

"On this article a vast crowd of absurdities open upon us at once, and many of them with the sanction of custom and authority. I shall first advert to the thickness of the food and it has, indeed, been a matter of wonder, how the custom of stuffing new born infants with bread could become so universal, or the idea first enter the mind of a parent, that such heavy food could be fit for its nourishment. It were well if the fond mother; and all well-inclined nurses, had more just ideas of the manner in which we are nourished; and especially, that it is not from

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the great quantity, nor from the quality of the food, abstractedly considered; since the inhabitants of different parts of the globe are equally healthy and long-lived who feed upon the most opposite diets. Parents, one should think, may very easily conceive that our nourishment arises from the use the stomach makes of the food it receives; which is to pass through such a change called digestion, as renders it balsamic, and fit to renew the mass of blood which is daily wasting and consumed. An improper kind, or too great a quantity taken at a time, or too hastily, before the stomach has duly disposed of its former contents, prevents this work of digestion, and, by making bad jui ces, weakens instead of strengthens the habit; and in the end produces worms, convulsions, rickets, kings-evil, slow fevers, purging, and general decay.

"Nature, it should be considered, has provided only milk for every animal adapted to draw it from the breast, and that of women is certainly among the thinnest of them; but at the same time, far more nutritive than bread, and, probably, than any other milk, as it contains a greater propor