146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



use of its squealing apparatus, and consequently squealing violently 

 from morning till night. Out-doors, in the baby-carriage, "cold 

 draughts " have to be guarded against, and a load of extra wrappers 

 completely counteract the benefit of the fresh air ; faint with nausea 

 and suffocating heat the little mummy lies motionless on its back, re- 

 splendent in its white surplice, a fit candidate for the honors of a life 

 whose every movement of a natural impulse will be suppressed as a 

 revival of barbarism and an insurrection against the statutes of an or- 

 thodox community. Hence, in a great degree, the disproportionate 

 mortality, in all northern countries of Christendom, among infants 

 under two years. In Spanish America, where infantile diseases are as 

 rare as in Hindostan, babies of all classes and all sizes toddle about 

 ?ia/i:ef?, nearly the year round ; and the Indians of Tamaulipas, between 

 Tampico and Matamoras, raise an astonishing number of brown ban- 

 tlings who are never troubled with clothes till they are big enough to 

 carry garden-stuff to a city where the police enforces the apron regula- 

 tion. 



But Mrs. Grundy a person's pinafore and the carpet ? Well, 

 get a lot of short linen hose, rather loose about the hips and tied around 

 the waist or buttoned to the skirts of a short frock. Change them as 

 often as you like. Wholesale they could be made for a dollar and 

 washed for a quarter a dozen. Out-doors add a pair of stockings with 

 canvas soles, and perhaps little rubber boots on wet days, but no cap 

 or shawl before October, and under no circumstances any swaddles or 

 baby night-gowns. Let us get rid of the " draught " superstition ; ca- 

 tarrhs are not taken by any creature of the open air, not by the fisher- 

 man's boy, paddling around in the surf and sitting barefooted in a wet 

 canoe or bareheaded on the windward cliffs, but by the cachectic 

 cadets of the tenement-barracks, where the same air is breathed and 

 rebreathed by the diseased lungs of a regiment of voluntary prisoners.* 



After the first frost, a cap with ear-flaps, double stockings, and 

 mittens out-doors can do no harm. A warm shirt and two quilt-blank- 

 ets will be enough in all but the coldest nights, and (if I had not seen 

 the thing done I should commit an outrage on common-sense by think- 

 ing it necessary to mention it) the face of a sleeping child should never 

 be covered with a shawl, nor when flies are very troublesome with 

 anything thicker than the lightest gauze handkerchief. "A great 

 store of clothes," says Lord Bacon, " either upon the bed or the back, 

 relaxes the body " ; and every observant parent must have noticed 

 that school-children complain a hundred times of being overdressed 

 for once that they ask for additional or warmer clothing. Indeed, only 

 dire habit can reconcile us to the mass of trappings and wrappings 



* " I shall not attempt to explain why ' damp clothes ' occasion colds rather than wet 

 ones, because I doubt the fact. I imagine that neither the one nor the other contributes 

 to this effect, and that the causes of colds are totally independent of wet and even of 

 cold." (Ben Franklin's *' Essays," p. 216.) 



