Place a human baby at the dug of a cow, a goat, or an ass, as you sometimes see them placed in semi-civilized countries, and what is it that you immediately feel? The sight is an offence to the eyes, a humiliation of our racial pride.—Why? Instinctively we feel and intellectually we know that Nature makes the wisest provision for her needs. When, therefore, we see one of our babies at the dugs of a goat, our sense of fitness is shocked: even our practical utilitarian prejudices receive a blow. We know instantly that the baby cannot have been meant to take that milk, because it is a nobler creature than the goat and its body has tasks and feats to perform with its food which the kid has not. Above all, it has that huge brain to develop, which the kid has not. Can it be possible that Nature could have overlooked that? The human brain is not only larger at birth than that of any other animal, but its rate of growth is also greater. Is it conceivable that Nature could have made no special provision for that? Hence our sense of degradation and revolt—feelings which somehow are not provoked when the milk reaches us in a bright glass-bottle, or in a nice clean tin covered with printed matter—because all the degrading side of it is then hidden from our view. The strange part of it, however, is that this sense of degradation and revolt is based upon fact; for not only on _a priori_ grounds may we deny that goat’s milk or any other substitute can adequately replace breast-feeding, but we may also deny it from positive knowledge. Years ago Dr Biedert showed that the most important differences between human and cow’s milk were qualitative rather than quantitative. A little later Dr G. von Bunge confirmed this view; and Dr Halliburton, the great physiologist, has recently repeated and emphasized it. It is impossible to enter here into the qualitative differences to which these authorities refer: suffice it to say that the gravity of the whole question from our standpoint lies not merely in the greater digestibility of human milk, but in the conspicuous difference between human milk and all other substitutes as a brain-developing food. Dr von Bunge, who calls attention to this point, claims not only that human milk is more complex than its substitutes, but that in it we find lecithin bodies in peculiar proportions, which serve for the construction of the inordinately large human brain.