336 THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



milk. After weathering an attack of croup, children often lie motion- 

 less on their backs with a peculiar glassy stare of their wide-open eyes. 

 Leave them alone ; instinct teaches them to assuage the distress of 

 their lungs by slow and deep respirations ; rest and a half-open win- 

 dow will do them more good than medicine. 



Healthful infants i. e., under rational management the great plu- 

 rality can soon be taught to transact their public business at season- 

 able hours, or at least to abstain from midnight serenades. If mothers 

 would make it a rule to do all their nursing and fondling in the daytime, 

 their little revivalists would soon learn to associate darkness with the 

 idea of silence and slumber. Habit will do wonders in such thinofs. 

 Captain Barclay and several American pedestrians learned to take 

 their half -hour naps as a traveler snatches a hasty lunch, and many 

 old soldiers develop a faculty of going off to sleep, as it were, at the 

 word of command, the moment their shoulders touch the guard- 

 house bunk. The two drowsiest years of my life I passed at an old- 

 style boarding-school, where teachers and pupils were limited to seven 

 hours of sleep, after nine hours of study, besides written exercises and 

 special recitations, and where sixty or seventy of us had to sleej) in 

 a large hall ; and I do not believe that the last flickering of our iive- 

 minutes candle was ever witnessed by a pair of more than half-oj^en 

 eyes. 



But that same faculty of sleeping and waking at short notice may 

 be utilized for the purpose of taking little naps whenever opportunity 

 offers in the last half-hour of the noontide recess, or during the 

 Buncombe interacts of a protracted session. The inhabitants of all 

 intertropical countries make the time of repose a movable festival, and 

 during the dog-days of our torrid summers it would clearly be the best 

 plan to imitate their example. " Children must not sleep in the day- 

 time," says a by-law of our time-dishonored Koran of domestic suj^er- 

 stitions ; and, not satisfied with keeping our little ones at school during 

 the drowsy afternoons of the summer solstice, we increase their misery 

 by stuffing them at the very noon of the hottest hours with a mass of 

 greasy (1. e., heat-producing and soporific) food. An hour after the 

 end of a long, sultry day comes the cool night-wind, heaven's own 

 blessing for all who hunger and thirst after fresh air ; but no, " Xight- 

 air is injurious" ; besides, Mrs. Grundy objects to promenades after 

 dark, so the children are driven to their suffocating, unventilated bed- 

 rooms, not to sleep but to swelter, till toward midnight, when drowsi- 

 ness subsides into a sort of lethargy which yields only to broad day- 

 light, three or four hours after sunrise ; "So much the better," says 

 the fashionable mother, who has passed the night at an ice-cream 

 ridotto, " and morning air isn't healthy, either ; most dangerous to 

 leave the house before the dew is off the grass." 



Only the curse of pessimism, our woful distrust of our natural in- 

 stincts, can explain such absurdities. The parched palate's petition 



