Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. 249 



sugar in the urine. Sometimes this sugar had been split — digested — 

 and sometimes absorbed and excreted unchanged. Later German in- 

 vestigators have affirmed this conclusion and have found that these in- 

 fants thrive very much more satisfactorily if fed on mixtures which 

 contain a very low percentage of sugar, or perhaps for a while contain 

 no sugar at all. Such a mixture is obtained by precipitating the casein 

 from the milk by the addition of an acid and re-dissolving or suspending 

 this casein in lime water or by adding such casein suspension to a butter- 

 milk mixture in which the carbohydrate has been lowered by acid 

 formation from sugar. What would suffice in most cases is to simply 

 leave out for a time the sugar usually added to the feedings. 



But the objection is raised that the child needs this food and is 

 there any harm in the child excreting a small amount of the sugar it 

 has taken in its food? Finklestein, a German investigator, lays great 

 stress upon the sugar excretion as a danger signal. It is these children 

 who go over so suddenly into the intoxication stage and sudden collapse. 

 Anyone who has ever seen a child in this condition will never forget 

 it. 



It was the pleasure of the writer to work last summer at a babies' 

 hospital. While there the urines of a number of infants were examined. 

 All those children in stages of intoxication or suffering from any acute 

 gastro-intestinal troubles were excreting sugar if sugar was present in 

 the diet, and furthermore, some children who were apparently well 

 were excreting sugar. These latter infants who continued under obser- 

 vation were suddenly taken with acute gastro-intestinal troubles and 

 died. The fact of the number of infant deaths from gastro-intestinal 

 diseases during the hot months, and practically during later months, is 

 too well known to need emphasis. The difficulty has been supposed to 

 be a bacteriological one, but when facts like those above are brought 

 out and brought out under hospital conditions, where all possible care 

 has been taken, it behooves us to stop and think a moment to see if 

 possibly the excess of sugar is not at fault, in some cases at least. 



As to the kind of sugar that should be added to the diet of an 

 infant, logically it is lactose, but experimental evidence goes to show 

 that lactose is absorbed no better, if as well as ordinary cane sugar, 

 which is much less expensive. 



In conclusion, we Mish to emphasize the following points : In 

 infants with weak digestion, contrary to our ideas based on the so-called 

 per centage method of feeding, the fat and sugar are much more apt 

 to cause trouble than the casein. Second, cane sugar can, with seeming 

 advantage, be substituted for the much more expensive milk sugar. 



