I HAVE here mentioned barely impropriety, or sometimes negation of aliment, without allowance for other causes of destruction to those infants, such as cold, bad air, uncleanliness, neglect of due attendence, or deficiency, in short, of requisites, which are not to be expected from the very poorer sort of the people, to whom the rearing of those infants is generally committed. But that omission of mine is neither undesigned nor unfair. I presume I shall have the greatest physicians on my side, in averring, that even new-born babes are endowed with a surprizing hardiness. Their little seemingly so delicate bodies bear cold to a degree scarcely credible, but from the commonness of both observation and practice, that they only thrive the better for immersions in cold water. Cleanliness, a good air, and attendence, have doubtless indeed some share in the well-doing of children of that age: but all together are in no degree of comparison to the importance of bestowing on children their appropriate aliment. The physical disquisitions into the reason of this do not belong to me here: nor are a few instances of infants reared by the spoon any valid justification for breaking the general rule of Nature, assigning to the female breast the nutrition of children: of which too there is this salutary consequence, that in the very act of lactation there is, by Nature, generated such an indearment of the suckled child to the nurse[20], as that she who began it perhaps only for hire, finds herself engaged by a growing affection to supply in some measure the place of the mother to the orphan or deserted babe. The rearing by the spoon is so far from inspiring any such dearness, that the innocent infant is considered only as an embarrassment, of which the quicker the riddance, in the death of the _brat_, so much the better. THE opinion, however, that this one of the greatest institutes of Nature for the preservation of the species, for which she has so admirably organized the female breast, could be dispensed with in favor of a most sordid savingness, has alone caused more human sacrifices, to that black Demon of INTEREST, than probably were ever made to the “grim idol of” Moloch in the valley of Hinnom, while the cries of the poor children could not be heard by ears closely stopped up in honor of that infernal spirit. BUT if any reader should imagine that I here invent any thing, or that, in favor of my inference of danger from the case of revolting against the unalterable institutes of Nature, I have exagerated matters, nothing will be more easy, nor probably at the same more shocking, than the procuring himself a proof of the scarce not actual murders I have mentioned.