FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X. 697 



mother's skirt with one hand and with the other fed herself a large, 

 underripe banana. Three more brothers and sisters, old enough to care 

 for themselves a little, clambered about, in imminent peril of broken 

 necks and trampled toes. One might label the picture, I thought, an 

 average American family on a holidaj'. As I looked at these children 

 I saw myself and brothers and sisters forty years ago, no better, no 

 worse. Measles, whooping cough and mumps w^ould be a part of those 

 children's upbringing, just as they had been of mine. If they lived 

 through these necessary evils, without too great depletion of vitality, 

 and if dread disease did not take them off, they might grow to manhood 

 and womanhood. Then I began to calculate that this family would make 

 five new families of the same kind, possibly with less endurance. 



"A friend of mine interrupted the trend of my thought to invite me to 

 go to the stock barns with her, where the premiums had just been 

 awarded. The man in charge of the horse barns showed his beauti- 

 ful animals, sleek and shining, with glowing pride. Blue ribbons and 

 red ribbons showed bravely on many headstalls. Every animal in the 

 clean, well-ordered cattle and hog pens had been fed and groomed with 

 the utmost care. A man pointed with pride to a pen of hogs and told 

 us that they had been watched almost night and day; the water they 

 drank had been analyzed, their food measured and weighed, and only 

 the kinds given them that would bring certain results. It was then that 

 the idea of a babies' health contest for our next state fair was born." 



From such a little beginning has come the series of babies' health 

 contests held during the past two years in a score of county and dis- 

 trict fairs, in at least three state fairs, and now planned for a dozen 

 state fairs in 1913, with a grand international contest in the Panama 

 exposition, at San Francisco, in 1915. The little gray lady, the originator 

 of the whole idea, Mrs. Mary T. Watts, of Audubon, Iowa, gives a list 

 of the contests already held, as follows: 



Iowa State Fair, 1911, 50 entries; 1912, 275. 



Missouri State Fair, 1912, 200 entries. 



Oregon State Fair, 1912, 200 entries. 



Milwaukee Household Exhibit, 1912, 80 entries. 



Fargo, N. D., Neighborhood Clubs, 1912, 150 entries. 



Farmers' Week, Columbia, Mo., 50 entries. 



Omaha, Made-in-Nebraska Show, 1913, 200 entries. 



National Western Live Stock Show, Denver, 1913, 200 entries. 



In addition to these, contests were held in county and district fairs, 

 in 1912, in a score of Iowa towns, notably Ames, Audubon, Avoca, 

 Algona, Brooklyn, Farmington, Marshalltown, Moravia and Sutherland. 



State-wide contests are already scheduled for 1913 in Iowa, Oregon 

 and Missouri (at the state fairs), with possibilties of Ohio, Massachu- 

 setts, Vermont and Michigan. Oregon has made appropriation for a 

 Child's Welfare building and Denver proposes making more of a fea- 

 ture of the babies' health contest next January than it did this year, 

 although the enthusiasm was so great at the contest that a National 

 Eugenics Society was organized at the live stock show, Mrs. Watts (the 

 little gray lady) being elected president, Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Bates, 



