The object of Miss Bulkley's monograph is to describe what that provision is, how adequate or inadequate, how systematic or haphazard, and to examine its effect on the welfare both of the children concerned, and of the general community. The present work is, therefore, complementary to Mr. Greenwood's _Health and Physique of School Children_, which was recently published by the Ratan Tata Foundation, and which gave an exhaustive description of the conditions of school children in respect of health as revealed by the reports of School Medical Officers. That the subject with which Miss Bulkley deals is one of the first importance, few, whatever views may be held as to the Act of 1906, will be found to deny. Almost all the medical authorities who have made a study of the health and physique of school children are unanimous that a capital cause of ill-health among them is lack of the right kind of food. "Defective nutrition," states Sir George Newman, "stands in the forefront as the most important of all physical defects from which school children suffer.... From a purely scientific point of view, if there was one thing he was allowed to do for the six million children if he wanted to rear an imperial race, it would be to feed them.... The great, urgent, pressing need was nutrition. With that they could get better brains and a better race." "Apart from infectious diseases," said Dr. Collie before the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, "malnutrition is accountable for nine-tenths of child sickness." "Food," Dr. Eichholz told the same body, "is at the base of all the evils of child degeneracy." "The sufficient feeding of children," declared Dr. Niven, the Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, "is by far the most important thing to attend to." "To educate underfed children," said Dr. Leslie Mackenzie, "is to promote deterioration of physique by exhausting the nervous system. Education of the underfed is a positive evil." What doctors understand by malnutrition is what the plain man calls starvation; and while it is, of course, due to other causes besides actual inability to procure sufficient food, the experience of those authorities which have undertaken the provision of meals in a thorough and systematic manner suggests that these statements as to the prevalence of malnutrition or starvation are by no means exaggerations. To say, as has recently been said by a writer of repute in the _Economic Journal_, "already 40,000 children are fed weekly at the schools without appreciably improving the situation," is a ridiculous misstatement of the facts. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in those areas where suitable and sufficient meals have been provided, there has been a marked improvement in the health of the children receiving them. The tentative conclusions on this point given for a single city by Mr. Greenwood (_Health and Physique of School Children_, pp. 62-67), are substantiated by the