76 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



the COW when given in its pure, undiluted state, 

 followed their instinct and common sense and diluted 

 it by the addition of water. It was a crude method 

 of modifying milk, to be sure, and the tally of its 

 victims will never be recorded. It is significant, 

 however, that the mothers, long before the subject 

 received the attention from scientific minds which 

 is now common, discovered that) according to the 

 age of the child and its strength, cow's milk needed 

 some dilution to adjust it to the child's need. But 

 among French physicians, led by such men as Budin, 

 Variot, and Dufour, there is a very widespread oppo- 

 sition to any attempt to lessen the differences between 

 human and bovine milk by any process of modifica- 

 tion, or, as the English say, "humanization." They 

 prefer to give the cow's milk unmodified, even to 

 very young infants, but insist that it must be either 

 sterihzed or pasteurized.^" In following the other 

 method of modifying the cow's milk to suit individual 

 requirements, American and English physicians are 

 doing in a scientific way what maternal instinct and 

 experience used to do in a crude, haphazard way 

 with disastrous results. They are minimizing the in- 

 evitable differences between natural and artificial 

 food, reducing the loss of the bottle-fed baby to the 

 minimum. 



In percentage-feeding as practised by such au- 

 thorities as Rotch and Chapin and their numerous 



