REMEDIAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS 227 



qualified success on the part of the infants' depots, 

 but, as a matter of fact, whUe it is believed the depots 

 helped, climatic conditions were especially favorable 

 in those years, and there was a general decline in the 

 infantile death-rate throughout the country, so that 

 the depots can only be credited with a part of the 

 decline, a part not to be determined and separately 

 set out. 



Dr. Newman, in the most serious study of the prob- 

 lems of infantile mortality published during recent 

 years, gives a very careful account of the Finsbury 

 infants' milk depot and shows the mortality among 

 children attending the depot, during the first year of 

 life, to have been equal to 59.1 per 1000 births as 

 compared with a mortality of 148.6 for Finsbury, but 

 only 169 infants used the milk. There were among 

 these 13 deaths, equivalent to a death-rate of 76.9 

 per 1000 births, but as three of the children were 

 dying when first brought to the depot, so that their 

 case was hopeless from the first, these should properly 

 not be counted." Now, small as the numbers are, 

 when it is remembered that 75 per cent of the children 

 were ill when they were brought to the depot, such 

 results are astonishing. Dr. Newman quotes, with 

 apparent approval, the claim made for the depot at 

 Fecamp, France, of a death-rate of 121 per 1000 births, 

 as compared with 240 for the city as a whole, and the 

 claims of St. Helens of a mortality of 103 per 1000 



