H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 139 



relation to the care of the young. It has been said, and I think truly, 

 that this awakening took place in the old Crimean days, when our loss of 

 men through disease, due to want of hygienic knowledge, was so appalling. 

 I call this interest rational because teachings were no longer accepted as 

 dogmas, but were tried, and their effect carefully watched. In other 

 words, the upper and middle classes were beginning to observe and to 

 think for themselves, with the result that one outstanding belief after 

 another went by the board, and children of succeeding generations were 

 brought up and trained a little differently and, as I think the result 

 shows, a little more wisely than were those of the generation which went 

 before. 



It may be objected that this study of child welfare has been going on 

 throughout the ages, and is by no means limited to the last half-century 

 or a little more ; but the point which I wish to make is that rational 

 knowledge, based upon experiment and observation, could only have spread 

 after medical men themselves began to learn scientific facts and to teach 

 them to those who were able and willing to understand them. 



It is in this way that, each year, the younger generation is brought up 

 a little more sanely than its forerunner ; and each year, too, the healthier 

 influences push their way a little lower into the social scale. Now we have 

 reached a stage in which the poorest child of the slums may be, and often 

 is, watched over by the child welfare and almoners' departments of our 

 great hospitals long before it is born, and, if its parents be not too stupid, 

 may, throughout its young life, enjoy very nearly the same healthy 

 surroundings and quite as much skilled medical advice as its richer 

 brethren, save that we cannot yet give it the amount of air it needs in which 

 to sleep healthily, or free it from the results of the ignorant and thought- 

 less cruelty of uneducated parents. Another generation or two must 

 pass and these things also will cease to be. It is grievous to think that 

 the hardest task of all is to give these poorer children their proper share of 

 pure night air, that deadly terror of our forefathers. So long as slum 

 areas and overcrowding last it is hard to see how this may be done, though 

 the chemists of the future, when they are not too busy with poison gas, 

 may be able to solve this problem too. 



Now if all, or even part of this, be true ; if for the last half -century 

 children have been better and more sanely cared for, there must surely 

 be something to show for it — something which our eyes may see at a 

 glance, or at least the beginnings of which we may show by contrasted 

 records, indices and tabulations. That there is indeed much to show is 

 clear enough to anyone who has walked the streets of London or of any 

 of our great cities for half a century with open eyes. How seldom nowadays 

 do we see the poor little half-starved bodies, so common thirty years ago, 

 shivering, coatless and bootless, in the depth of the winter ; their 

 miserable little limbs maimed by rickets, their ears streaming with matter 

 from middle-ear disease, and their eyelids red with ophthalmia. We 

 know, thank God, that these are fast becoming things of the past ; indeed 

 the modern medical student thinks himself lucky if he sees a single case 

 of rickets, about which his text-book has so much to say. 



Bad teeth, adenoids, septic tonsils, and glands in the neck, unfortu- 

 nately, are still common enough, but slowly and surely these are being 



