Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/702

684 have the infant of aristocracy, the infant of the middle classes, the infant of the poor, the infant dependent upon charity. Each of these inherits an environment peculiar to itself; its house, its nursery and sleeping-apartment, its nurses and attendants, who solve the problems of its food and raiment. Take the matter of inheritance, not of money or lands, but of constitution. The extreme classes found in the city and not in the country, the very wealthy and the very poor, are likely to bestow on their offspring a latent tendency to disease. The ultrafashionable mother, the self-indulgent father, hand down to their children overwrought nervous systems and weak physical powers, which result in early death, or more often a life of protracted feebleness. In the lowest classes the untoward effects upon the children of poverty, intemperance, and moral obliquity are incalculable.

The city infants belonging to the middle classes often suffer because of the struggle of their parents to maintain a foothold in society, and to mount the steps in social life which will bring them distinction. It would be a long discussion to enter into all the questions of heredity which influence the fate of a child. They are vital questions, however, which require the utmost delicacy in handling, but which are of transcending importance to the individual and to the race. Very little of the common sense, which prevails in preserving and rearing choice stock exists in relation to the human animal. If by chance the infant is well-born—that is, has the germ of a constitution which will unfold untainted by scrofula or epilepsy, or any other foul disease which will rob it of a healthy mental and physical development as life unrolls before it—such inheritance is unequaled. Dr. Ireland has shown the effects of heredity as seen in tracing through three hundred and fifty years the health history of the house of Spain. The children, though born to a kingdom and a crown, were cursed with an hereditary nervous taint which sometimes passed over a generation only to appear again in various forms and intensities as epilepsy, hypochondria, melancholia, mania, and imbecility, till at length it extinguished the direct royal line.

With a multitude of hereditary tendencies germinating within it, the city infant opens its eyes upon surroundings which are to influence it scarcely less. About city homes lurk unseen perils to babies. There has been much written and said about the plumbing of city houses and the evils which have sprung from it, so that now, when children are afflicted with diphtheria, immediately comes the question. Are there escaping sewer-gases in the house which they occupy? Dr. J. Lewis Smith remarks that diphtheria appeared in New York in 1858 after an absence of more than fifty years, the most severe cases occurring in the upper part of the city along old water-courses, where in consequence of street-grading, water was stagnant and impregnated with decaying animal and vegetable matter. The infants are more liable to succumb than those older, as the poison acts more quickly on