_Advantages of the Natural Feeding of Infants._--The natural method of nourishment--that is to say, suckling at the maternal breast, is the only method of infant-feeding which properly complies with natural requirements. The adoption or non-adoption of this method is a matter of decisive influence upon the subsequent health of the child. The ideal is that the child should be suckled until it is nine months old. But, at least, we should insist upon the mother giving suck for the first weeks of the infant’s life, two months being regarded as an irreducible minimum. After two months, the dangers of artificial feeding are considerably less. Within certain limits, the longer infants are suckled, the lower are their disease-rate and death-rate, the greater is their power of resistance to disease, and the higher is their mental capacity. When we compare the results of natural feeding with those of artificial feeding of infants, we cannot fail to recognise that the former method gives children greater powers of resistance to and recovery from those diseases which are inseparable from the nutritive processes. Artificial feeding frequently leads to illness, life-long debility, premature death, &c. In children suckled by their own mothers, digestive disorders are usually trifling; in children suckled by a wet-nurse, such disorders are more frequent and more obstinate, but are seldom really dangerous; in artificially-fed infants, such disorders are extraordinarily common, their course is extremely serious, and a fatal issue is far from rare. Statistical data prove beyond question that methods of feeding have a great influence upon infant mortality. The death-rate is higher in proportion to the degree to which the mode of nutrition diverges from the natural method of suckling by the child’s own mother; the death-rate is higher in children suckled by wet-nurses than in those suckled by their own mothers; it is much higher in children fed on cow’s milk than in breast-fed children. Among 1000 children dying during the first year of life, medical returns show that 450 succumb to digestive disorders and marasmus. Many physicians go so far as to ascribe 70 per cent. to 80 per cent. of all infantile deaths to artificial feeding. A statistical error arises in this way, that children dying immediately after birth, before they could have been put to the breast at all, are apt to be included among the deaths due to artificial feeding, whereby, of course, the evil effects of this practice are overestimated. Where artificial feeding is badly carried out, the infantile mortality is enormous. The children that escape death tend to become rachitic, anæmic, or weakly, and later in life readily succumb to tuberculosis.