=Effect on Offspring.=--Although the law prescribes eighteen years as the minimum age at which women may follow this occupation, two cases have occurred recently in which girls have died from lead poisoning who were under the age. Nor does the suffering cease with the men and women who work in the lead mills; they bequeath an awful legacy of sickness to their children--an amount of suffering which is almost disproportionate to their own. I came not long ago in contact with a woman who had worked for the fifteen years of her married life on the “pans” in a lead mill, a process which is considered to be non-dangerous; during her employment she had suffered little, yet this woman had never borne a living child. I give another dismal chronicle in support of my remarks.[17] “C. E., twenty-seven years of age. There was first a living child, then one miscarriage. She left the lead works and went into the country, where a second child was born. She then returned to the lead works and had two miscarriages. M. W., aged thirty-nine, a lead worker for eighteen years, has had twelve children, of whom four are now living. The remaining eight died at ages varying from five days to four, six, and fourteen months, in convulsions. She has had in addition five miscarriages, three in succession. In the case of Mary A----, aged forty years, whose mother too had been a lead worker, we have a history of eight children, all of whom died in convulsions.” In one form or another paralysis too is common among the workers. It is sometimes acute and sometimes chronic, and its commonest manifestation is in “wrist-drop,”--loss of power in the wrist. The victim of “wrist-drop” is incapacitated from lifting or moving anything or in any way using the hands, and this crippled condition sometimes lasts for life. [17] See DR. OLIVER, _Lead Poisoning_. =Greater Susceptibility of Women.=--The greatest authorities on the subject of lead-poisoning, notably Dr. Oliver, lay stress on the greater liability to lead-poisoning which women show over men. Not only do we find that women are more susceptible, but they are susceptible earlier in life. Girls from 18 to 23 years of age are at the most susceptible age, while with men the dangers of lead-poisoning are greatest between 41 and 48. The fashion in which men and women suffer differs also, for we note that, while young women suffer very readily from “saturnian poison”--fall quickly victims to colic, and recover to be again and more severely attacked--men may work for long terms of years, suffering slightly and seldom, till they fall victims, at the end of long service, to paralysis. It must be borne in mind, however, that those women who have been the subject of Dr. Oliver’s investigation have been brought more directly and constantly into contact with the peculiarly dangerous processes of lead manufacture than the men.