Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/227

Rh in a hospital, no matter how you ventilate the wards, a high death-rate is the inevitable result, and in the nursery depressed vitality and sickliness as certainly follow upon want of room and air. One thousand cubic feet is not too much to allow for each person.

No nurseries should be papered unless the paper is varnished, for, besides the great risk of putting up an arsenical paper, there is this to be considered—that children are certain to go through some infectious illnesses, after each of which the nurseries must be disinfected and repapered. The best thing for the walls is paint, which can always be washed and disinfected with little trouble, and once on the walls will last for years. Distemper color is the alternative to paint, but with it a dado of paint or varnished paper should be used, as it comes off when touched or rubbed. Distemper should be renewed every year, or after any infectious disease. Nothing that can hold dust should be allowed in the nursery. There should be no carpet nailed down over the floor; it can not be taken up sufficiently often to keep the room sweet, and the accumulation of dust under such a carpet is astonishing. Directly the children begin to romp, the room becomes most unwholesome with its dust-laden atmosphere, flavored by the many mugs of milk that have been spilt, and the many pieces of bread and butter that have been dropped face downward on the carpet during the past year. But I have not space to do more than point out some few things to be avoided, and must as far as possible keep to generalities.

Our lords and masters arrange the diet of dogs and horses with great care; whether the dog should be fed on meat or farinaceous foods, whether the horses should be turned out to grass or fed upon oats or hay, are momentous questions. Any one having the management of horses will notice that a highly fed animal will be able to do a much larger amount of work than one that is stinted and underfed; that a horse fed upon corn is full of spirit, while if turned out to grass it becomes lazy and sleepy, thus proving that food materially affects the spirit and disposition of the animal. And if this be true for one animal, it will be true for all; and it follows that the superior animal—the child—will be equally affected by variations in food, and will require as much care in feeding.

This will hardly be disputed, and yet very rarely is any system followed in feeding children, and if an ordinary fairly educated man were asked to consider the diet of his children, and whether such a diet might not be found which would develop to its utmost the physical powers of each child, he would probably reply that, when he was young, children ate what was put before them, and were none the worse for it. Now, it is impossible to