Zwieback and whole wheat or Graham crackers are permissible in small amounts after the ninth month. After nine months the healthy baby should also have a soft-boiled egg occasionally, also baked apple and well-cooked, mashed spinach or carrots. Food should be given only at regular intervals and nothing but water between feedings. Starch-digesting ferments are present at birth in sufficient amounts to digest the sugar in milk, but they do not develop sufficiently to digest starches until about the twelfth month, so white bread, crackers made from white flour, potatoes, rice, etc., should not be given the child under a year. * * * * * [Sidenote: Artificial Feeding] When artificial feeding is necessary, the physician must decide what modification is best for the baby. One can only determine by experimenting upon the actual percentages of fat, proteins, and sugar which each baby needs, following, in general, the proportions contained in mother’s milk, because while many babies thrive on a food of this composition, some do not. The formulæ given are simply a guide, as the proportions may need to be changed, or may need to be made weaker in some cases and stronger in others. The composition of human milk, however, is a guide to the infant’s digestive ability. This must be determined by a careful study of the _individual baby_ as every baby is a problem by itself. As previously mentioned, no artificial food is the same as human milk, although it may contain the same proportions of the different elements, and it is often difficult, especially during the first few months, to prepare a combination on which the child will thrive. Cow’s milk, properly prepared, is the nearest available substitute for human milk. It must be modified, as the digestion of the calf at birth is equal to that of an infant at eight or nine months. Farmers have in recent years become more particular about the care of their cows and cleanliness in milking because the educational campaign with regard to the danger to human life from tuberculous animals has caused a greater public demand for good, clean milk. Many infectious diseases are conveyed by milk, and impure milk is a large cause of the extraordinarily high mortality of early infancy. With the improvement of the milk supply, the decline in the infant death-rate has been wondrously gratifying. Manufacturers have taken advantage of the fact that the public has become a little afraid of cow’s milk and have extensively advertised their prepared foods, claiming them to be the best substitute for mother’s milk. However, experiments have proven that these statements for the most part are misleading, the composition of the foods not being suited to the actual requirements of the infant. Some prominent physicians think that infant mortality has been increasing since prepared foods have been used so extensively.