Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/228

216 prove that they were none the worse for an indiscriminate diet. No one can say how many slight illnesses might have been avoided, or how many severe ones might have been insignificant, had the child been in a perfectly wholesome state of body, which can only result when it has lived on proper food. Good blood can only be obtained by good food, while weakly or even diseased constitutions may be greatly amended by simple attention to diet.

How little does the ordinary young mother know of her child's requirements! The first baby is generally subjected to a terrible number of experiments: the mother, perhaps, gives it a new food merely because Mrs. So-and-so's baby takes it, having no notion as to whether it is suitable for her own infant's digestion.

I shall now turn to the important subject of clothing. The first object of clothes (at any rate in such a climate as ours) is to keep the body from being chilled during our incessant variations of temperature, and it is well to remark that the prevention of chill has nothing to do with "coddling," which is keeping the body needlessly warm merely because warmth is pleasant. Clothes should be light, and of woolen material, and should in no way impede free movement.

It may seem superfluous to state facts which are no doubt obvious to every one, but it is not of common occurrence to see a child dressed in a reasonable manner, especially when it is very young. Although I own that children are now more sensibly clothed than was the case thirty years ago, it is still common to see an infant, who can take no exercise to warm himself, wearing a low-necked, short-sleeved, short-coated dress in the coldest weather. The two parts of the body—viz., the upper portion of the chest and the lower portion of the abdomen—which it is most important to keep from variations of temperature, are exposed, and the child is rendered liable to colds, coughs, and lung diseases on the one hand, and bowel complaint on the other. What little there is of the dress is chiefly composed of open work and embroidery, so that there is about as much warmth in it as in a wire sieve, and the socks accompanying such a dress are of cold white cotton, exposing a cruel length of blue and red leg. I can not see the beauty of a pair of livid blue legs, and would much rather behold them comfortably clad in a pair of stockings. If the beauty lie in the shape of the leg, that shape will be displayed to as much advantage in a pair of stockings; if it lie in the coloring of the flesh, beautiful coloring will not be obtained by leaving the leg bare; and from the artistic point of view, a blue or red stocking is infinitely preferable to a blue and red leg.

There is a comfortable supposition that children do not feel cold so much as grown-up persons, but this is not true. It is a fact that not only has a child less power of generating heat than