Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/455

Rh is it essential next following the period of nursing, that every food should be broken up, or 'refined' to facilitate its assimmilation and combinations in the structures of the body, since the functions of the organism are adapted to these processes.

Unfortunately for the infant, however, it frequently happens that after weaning, and if it has been nursed by a healthy mother, or other wet nurse, being well fed on two or three pints of wholesome milk, daily, its food supply is reduced by substitution of one kind or another, more or less devoid of essential elements, with the common result of emaciation and tenderness, and increased liability to sickness. Moreover, as said by Dr. William H. Maxwell, Superintendent of Public Schools of New York City and president of the National Educational Association, in his address at the International Congress of Arts and Science, September 23, 190-1:

Education, whether physical or mental, is seriously retarded, if not practically impossible, when the body is improperly or imperfectly nourished. The child of poverty, with body emaciated, blood thin and nerves on edge, because he has not enough to eat, grows up stunted in body and in mind.

What a farce it is to talk of schools providing equal opportunities for all when there are hundreds of thousands of children in our city schools who can not learn because they are always hungry!

The schools of Paris provide a simple, wholesome midday meal for their hungry children. In many places in the British Islands the same thing is being done. Should we do less in the cities of democratic America? In no other way can we be sure that the schools will, as far as education may, provide equal opportunities for all.

With regard to certain infectious diseases to which children are especially liable, in part, doubtless, because of their greater functional activity, but chiefly because their power of resistance has not yet become sufficiently fortified—for it is well known that adults generally who have not encountered those diseases in childhood rarely contract them subsequently—the same relative immunity exists; the strong and vigorous child is much less likely to contract them than the feeble; and the convalescent, those who are particularly feeble from any one of such diseases, are well known to be the most of all liable to attack and to succumb from another. And of pulmonary consumption, the most prevalent and the most fatal of all diseases, who does not know that enfeeblement invites it? That individuals are less and less liable to it—whether traceable to hereditary taint or otherwise—in proportion as coddling has been avoided, appetite for wholesome fat food cultivated, cold bathing habitual, protective but loose clothing worn, and exercise in the open air unrestrained? By the maintenance of these conditions all the processes of healthy organization are promoted and the constitution fortified against tubercle bacilli, as, in like manner, against other disease germs, no matter whence the quarter or at