“Oh, yes! you men make ludicrous blunders about children. But that’s no help. A young mother gets a tender human creature into her keeping, full of possibilities. Her first concern is, not only to keep it in health, but, so to speak, to fill it with reserves of health to last a lifetime. At once her perplexities begin. I shall not even ask to be excused for venturing upon details; the affairs of a young human being are important enough to engage the attention of Queen, Lords, and Commons, did they but know it. Well, a mother I know wished her child to be clothed delicately, as befits a first-born. She sent to Ireland for a delicious baby trousseau of lace and cambric. You gentlemen don’t understand. Hardly had the dear little garments gone through their first wash, when somebody tells her that ’oo’ a’ ’oo’ is the only wear for babies and grown ups. I doubt if to this day she knows why, but there was a _soupçon_ of science in the suggestion, so the sweet cambrics were discarded and fine woollens took their place. By-and-by, when the child came to feed like other mortals, there was a hail of pseudo-science about her ears. ‘Grape-sugar,’ ‘farinaceous foods,’ ‘saliva,’ and what not; but this was less simple than the wool question. She could make nothing of it, so asked her doctor how to feed the child. Further complications arose: ‘the child sees everything;’ ‘the child knows everything;’ ‘what you make him now he will be through life;’ ‘the period of infancy is the most important in his life.’ My poor friend grew bewildered, with the result that, in her ignorant anxiety to do right, she is for ever changing the child’s diet, nurse, sleeping hours, airing hours, according to the last lights of the most scientific of her acquaintance; and ’tis my belief the little one would be a deal better off brought up like its mother before it.” “Then, Mrs. Meredith, you would walk in the old paths?” “Not a bit of it! Only I want to see where I’m going. I think we live in an age of great opportunities. But my contention is, that you cannot bring up children on hearsay in these days; there is some principle involved in the most everyday matter, and we must go to school to learn the common laws of healthy living and well-being.” “Mrs. Meredith is right: here is serious work sketched out for us, and of a kind as useful for ourselves as for our children. We _must_ learn the first principles of human physiology.” “Would not it do to learn what is called Hygiene? I have a notion that is physiology made easy; that is, you are just taught what to do, without going _fully_ into the cause why.”