Some practitioners, with whom I have conversed on the subject, though willing to allow that protracted suckling, by depraving the milk, may be the means of occasioning Meningitis in infants during or shortly after the time they are supplied with this improper food, yet could not conceive how it can act as a cause of that disease at some future period; I do not myself, while attempting to account for it, discover any pathological difficulty. In these cases it is very probable, that although the protracted suckling was not sufficient to produce actual Meningitis at its conclusion, yet that it so weakened the system in general, and the brain in particular, as to render the latter especially predisposed to inflammatory action; and that we have reason to suppose this not only possible, but probable, from analogy, cannot be denied, since it is known that scrofulous children, in whom there is great laxity and debility of habit, are inordinately liable to be affected with Hydrocephalus, or Water in the Brain. 'Dr. Perceval observes, that of twenty-two cases of which he kept notes, _eleven were certainly strumous children_, and _four were probably so_.' 'From my own observations,' remarks Dr. Cheyne, 'I should think this proportion a very moderate one. When a whole family is swept away by Hydrocephalus, I suspect _it is intimately connected with this strumous taint_.' The testimony of Sauvages may also be adduced, who says, 'Novi familiam cujus infantes circa sextum ætatis annum omnes periere ex hoc morbo, _Scrofula huic effusioni ansam præbente_.' The brain, in consequence of this local debility, may become affected from causes which otherwise would, perhaps, have produced no injurious consequences whatever; and hence it is, that when labouring under other diseases, and especially Hooping-cough, those children who have been suckled too long appear so very liable to have the head secondarily affected. It is worthy of notice, that among the cases which have been detailed in the foregoing pages, were fourteen in whom affection of the head supervened during the progress of other diseases, and in ten of them the disease was Hooping-cough. The treatment of Meningitis arising from protracted suckling will not differ from what is proper when it has been produced by other causes; except that the depletory measures should not be carried to so great an extent, as it must be remembered that the disease is existing in constitutions _already debilitated_.