“One of the most striking things about children suffering from malnutrition is their vulnerability. They ‘take’ everything. Catarrhal processes in the nose (adenoids), pharynx, and bronchi are readily excited, and, once begun, tend to run a protracted course. There is but little resistance to any acute infectious disease which the child may contract. One illness often follows another, so that these children are frequently sick for almost an entire season. Their muscular development is poor, they tire readily, are able to take but little exercise, and their circulation is sluggish. Mentally, they are usually bright, often precocious. Many would be called nervous children.”—_The Diseases of Infancy and Childhood_, by L. Emmet Holt, M.D., LL.D., p. 231. “General malnutrition is the commonest pathological feature of infant life. Probably 50 per cent of all infants in this country (England) suffer from a greater or less degree, and this large proportion is caused undoubtedly by the extremely unsatisfactory methods of substitute feeding at present in vogue. Illness, in the usually accepted sense of the word, is not present. No specific disease can be diagnosed, and unless the indications are realized, the degeneration is allowed to proceed until marasmus or some acute disorder supervenes.... “Marasmus represents the extreme result of gradual and long-continued malnutrition. Extreme wasting is the cardinal, and indeed only, specific symptom. The term is not applicable to those cases where the wasting is the result of exhaustion due to the incidence of specific disease, such, for instance, as tuberculosis.... “The most striking and perhaps the commonest result of impaired nutrition is the disease generally known by the name of rickets. Though some of its most obvious features are those associated with changes in the osseous system, those are by no means the only effects of the disease. Rachitis is the expression of profound pathological changes occurring in practically all the tissues of the body. “No other disease illustrates so completely the effects of inadequate nutrition. An infant nursed by its mother and receiving from her a sufficient supply of adequate food, never contracts the disease, however disadvantageous its environment may be in other respects. “Defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of rachitis; while, as might be expected, the most advanced forms of the disease are to be seen when the effects of inadequate food are intensified by unhygienic environment....