Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/703

 their susceptible systems, and, as they are shut up in the house, they are much more exposed to it. Especially is this true in the tenement house, where the surroundings of the city infant are at their worst.

Lack of pure air, air untainted with human emanations and sewer gas, is one of the great causes of infant mortality in cities. It deteriorates the health of the naturally robust; it robs the delicate of their chances for life; it sows the seeds of contagious diseases; it hastens the fatal termination of those who are sick.

Many mothers, anxious for their children, with mistaken zeal protect them from the fresh air. They are especially afraid of night air, and shut their babies up in rooms which would make a well person giddy and sick to enter in the morning. In the country, houses are built less substantially and in exposed situations, and the fresh, searching air will find its way in, in spite of unhygienic resistance.

The little ones are too often brought up on the hot-house plan. Mothers, however, are awakening to the fact that babies must have their airings, and among the better classes the nurse takes the baby out every day when the weather will permit. One must admire the beautiful infants in perambulators, the chubby little run-abouts that are to be seen in the city parks and squares. Their handsome faces, finely formed figures, and rosy cheeks, go to show that children in the city, when properly cared for, can become the embodiment of health. In the country the children are usually looked after by their mothers, who have an average amount of intelligence.

Babies who are constantly held and watched and tended do not thrive. They grow fretful, uneasy, and pale, no one knows why. The aristocratic baby is at a disadvantage in this respect, unless money—as it may sometimes—procures an intelligent, faithful nurse, a foster-mother.

To intrust an infant to some baby-tenders is almost as much an act of abandonment as that of the heathen mother, who throws her babe into the jaws of the crocodile of the sacred river. The children who have grown up through a wretched childhood to a crippled and deformed maturity caused by the carelessness of nurses, who have let them fall or otherwise injure themselves, are not a few. Nevertheless it must be said that when the number of nurse-girls who take care of little ones alien to them is considered, the patient devotion and painstaking fidelity they show to fretful children spoiled by indulgent parents are marvelous.

If the rich children are spoiled by over-attention, this can not be said of the children of the poor. The little waif born in the tenement house, if it has no brothers or sisters, is often locked up by its mother and left an hour or two by itself while she goes out to work, to gossip, or to shop. If she goes out by the day, an obliging neighbor (and the poor are wonderfully helpful to each other) will let the child come into her apartment, where it can sit on the floor or the dirty bed