38 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



change will prove disastrous to the human race. It 

 is in the transition period that there is trouble; the 

 consequences are frightfully severe in their morbidity 

 during the period of experimentation, while science 

 is patiently and slowly learning the secrets of Nature's 

 wondrous processes. Doubtless a tremendous mor- 

 tality attended the change from a diet of roots to a 

 more varied diet, including grains and cooked meat, 

 by our early ancestors in the far-away infancy of 

 the race, but the species survived nevertheless. So 

 it is not wonderful that the mortality among arti- 

 ficially fed infants at the present time is shockingly 

 great; we have little more than begun the study of 

 the problems of infant feeding. 



Still, it is impossible to read the statistics relating 

 to the mortality of artificially fed babies without 

 a sense of sickening depression. To know that, 

 according to Dr. H. M. Koplik, in our large cities 

 more than half of the deaths of infants under one 

 year are due to summer diarrhoea, almost exclusively 

 caused by defective feeding,^" or that Chaterinkofif 

 found that of 20,000 infants dying of intestinal dis- 

 orders in France four-fifths were bottle-fed,'' is to 

 realize something, but only a little, of the extent 

 of the evil. We have seen that in Norway and 

 Sweden the death-rate among babies is low in con- 

 sequence of the almost universal practice of breast- 

 feeding; now let us take some figures relating to 



