“The starting beverage meets the thirsty lip; ’Tis joy to yield it, and ’tis joy to sip.” _The newborn infant needs no artificial food._ It should be put to the breast whenever it shows an inclination. The true mother will delight in the privilege of nursing her child, and will allow nothing but the most entire inability to prevent the exercise of this maternal office. The mother’s milk is the natural food, and nothing can fully take its place. Every means should be used to secure and maintain this natural nutriment before resorting to artificial food. The nursing process, by sympathetic action, assists in restoring the uterus to normal conditions. A few years since everybody supposed the baby must be fed artificially the first two days of its life, that there was a break in nature’s provision for its sustenance. The consequence was the poor little victim was dosed with all sorts of slops, catnip tea, panada, gruel, cracker water, cream tea, etc., etc. Remember, it _needs nothing_ but the secretion that is in the breast, which is laxative at first, and removes the meconium from the bowels. If for any reason the mother has not milk for her child, or is separated from it, the best substitute is a wet nurse, whose babe should be near the same age. The nurse should be well and strong, having abundant and nourishing milk. THE BEST ARTIFICIAL FOOD is cream reduced and sweetened with sugar of milk. Analysis show that the human milk contains more cream and sugar and less casein than the milk of animals. The reduced cream, sweetened, closely approximates human milk. The difference in the quality of cream presents a great difficulty. No rule can be given for its reduction. Most nurses leave it too rich, and the child’s system is soon deranged. To obviate this difficulty, let new milk stand from four to six hours, take the top off, reduce one-half with hot water; to one pint add one teaspoonful of sugar of milk and one grain of phosphate of lime. When the child is from three to five months old, oatmeal, barley or bran gruel can be added. _Children have not sufficient secretion of saliva to convert starch into sugar._ Therefore never use arrowroot or corn starch; these do not digest in the stomach, and intestinal derangement is likely to follow. Bran or barley gruel furnishes phosphates, which are essential to stimulate digestion. Microscopical examination of the artificial foods prepared and sold for infants, proves many of them deficient in gluten and too abundant in starch to make them desirable nutriment. The following extract from “Playfair’s Midwifery” explains the