684 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have the infant of aristocracy, the infant of the middle classes, the in- 

 fant of the poor, the infant dependent upon charity. Each of these 

 inherits an environment peculiar to itself ; its house, its nursery and 

 sleeping-apartment, its nurses and attendants, who solve the problems 

 of its food and raiment. Take the matter of inheritance, not of money 

 or lands, but of constitution. The extreme classes found in the city 

 and not in the country, the very wealthy and the very poor, are likely 

 to bestow on their offspring a latent tendency to disease. The ultra- 

 fashionable mother, the self-indulgent father, hand down to their chil- 

 dren overwrought nervous systems and weak physical powers, which 

 result in early death, or more often a life of protracted feebleness. 

 In the lowest classes the untoward effects upon the children of pov- 

 erty, intemperance, and moral obliquity are incalculable. 



The city infants belonging to the middle classes often suffer be- 

 cause of the sti'uggle of their parents to maintain a foothold in society, 

 and to mount the steps in social life which will bring them distinc- 

 tion. It would be a long discussion to enter into all the questions of 

 heredity which influence the fate of a child. They are vital questions, 

 howevei-, which require the utmost delicacy in handling, but which are 

 of transcending importance to the individual and to the race. Very 

 little of the common sense which prevails in preserving and rearing 

 choice stock exists in relation to the human animal. If by chance the 

 infant is well-bom — that is, has the germ of a constitution which will 

 unfold untainted by scrofula or epilepsy, or any other foul disease 

 which will rob it of a healthy mental and physical development as 

 life unrolls before it — such inheritance is unequaled. Dr. Ireland 

 has shown the effects of heredity as seen in tracing through three hun- 

 dred and fifty years the health history of the house of Spain. The 

 children, though born to a kingdom and a crown, were cursed with an 

 hereditary nervous taint which sometimes passed over a generation 

 only to appear again in various forms and intensities as epilepsy, hy- 

 pochondria, melancholia, mania, and imbecility, till at length it extin- 

 guished the direct royal line. 



With a multitude of hereditary tendencies germinating within it, 

 the city infant opens its eyes upon surroundings which are to influ- 

 ence it scarcely less. About city homes lurk unseen perils to ba- 

 bies. There has been much written and said about the plumbing of 

 city houses and the evils which have sprung from it, so that now, when 

 children are afflicted with diphtheria, immediately comes the question, 

 Are there escaping sewer-gases in the house which they occupy ? Dr. 

 J. Lewis Smith remarks that diphtheria appeared in New York in 

 1858 after an absence of more than fifty years, the most severe cases 

 occurring in the upper part of the city along old water-courses, where 

 in consequence of street-grading, water was stagnant and impregnated 

 with decaying animal and vegetable matter. The infants are more 

 liable to succumb than those older, as the poison acts more quickly on 



