Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/226

214 especially in these days of intense competition, when, given an equality of brains and education, it is the strong body that tells in the long run, and gives staying power. That alone can help the mind to bear the strain, and anything that can assist our children to bear this daily increasing strain is surely not beneath our notice.

It is really surprising to see the amount of trouble and pains bestowed on the proper housing and feeding of horses and dogs, or other domestic animals, while at the same time comparatively little attention is paid to these matters with regard to the rearing of children. Model stables and model kennels abound, while the model nursery is almost wholly unknown. Warming, ventilation, and aspect are all subjects which are thoroughly considered in the stable, while as regards the nursery they are generally left for chance to decide—though the health of a child is surely more important than that of a horse or a dog. We have all stayed in country houses, where the host has taken us over his beautiful stables fitted with every convenience, and have heard his anxious inquiries as to the health of his favorites, or we have been driven to the model cow-sheds, or kennels, but which of us has been taken over the model nursery?

The men can not be troubled about babies! (though they have no objection to puppies or calves)—they leave all that to the women—and the women, that is to say the mistresses, leave it to the nurses, often entirely ignorant though kindly persons, whose chief recommendation is that they are so fond of children! This would seem a ridiculous state of affairs were it not so lamentable.

Two of the best rooms in the house should be assigned to the children, one for the night the other for the day nursery, but this is by no means often done. In small houses where there is but one spare room, it is of common occurrence to see the largest and sunniest apartment set aside for the visitors, who perhaps occupy it for two months in the year, while the children have to live cramped up in a small, sunless garret.

Sunshine is as necessary to the human being as to the plant; and it is said in confirmation of this that, during the Crimean War, Miss Nightingale nursed the wounded soldiers in a hospital one side of which looked north, the other south, and that she observed that the soldiers lying in the wards with a southern aspect recovered far sooner than their comrades in those on the northern or sunless side. In our climate it is hardly possible to have too much sunshine, and the nurseries should certainly have a southern outlook.

Where there is a large family of children the night nursery is frequently overcrowded, and no regard is paid as to whether there is sufficient cubic space for each person. If there be