The enormous popularity of artificial feeding, therefore, must be due to the increased activities of women of all classes outside the home, which is one of the most noticeable features of the Women’s Movement, and the consequent disinclination on their part to undertake the rearing of their children in the natural manner. Together with the decline in the function on the one hand, and women’s refusal to suckle on the other, there has, as usual, arisen both a scientific technique and a host of substitutes which take the place of mother’s milk; and, in accordance with our traditional tendencies, we have once more neglected the effort to restore natural conditions, in order to apply all our ingenuity to the task of bringing artificial aids to perfection. Now this would be all very well, and no one could rightly complain, if the substitutes in this case were more akin to natural conditions than are most artificial aids. If this were so we might regret, from the sentimental and the æsthetic standpoints, the evanescence of breast-feeding, and sympathize _en passant_ with the mothers who were deprived of it as an experience; but we should be able to advance no practical reasons why it was to be deplored from the standpoint of human desirability. And, indeed, for many years this has been the position. Although doctors and commercial corporations repeatedly protest that breast-feeding is best, they are quite ready in the same breath to admit that artificial feeding can be made “as good as mother’s milk”; and no one is in the least perturbed when he hears that his own child or that millions of other babies are being hand-fed. We have even read the work of one English doctor who smugly proclaims that we shall improve on Nature in this matter! Thus, once again, while flagrant abnormalities are becoming the rule amongst us, science hastens to set our minds at rest by a shower of artificial aids; and, since we can “carry on,” nothing more is said. The problem appears to be a simple one, and, to give scientists their due, they have done little to complicate it. Mother’s milk contains so much water, so much protein, carbo-hydrates, fat, and mineral salts, and, when once you have these ingredients in the proper proportions, you have a synthetic product “as good as mother’s milk.” Indeed, so long have these ingredients and their quantitative values held the field, to the exclusion of everything else, that we have come to believe that cow’s milk or even Allenbury’s is as normal as breast-feeding. And yet, if we were to undergo a strange and uncommon test hardly ever applied in highly civilized countries, how quickly would our blind faith in even the best artificial methods receive a shock! True, sentiment alone would be responsible for the commotion; but in this case sentiment would be strangely akin to true knowledge.