157 
SOUP FOE CHILDEEN. 
BY BAEON LIEBIG. 
. ■■ 
F oe motliers wL.0 are denied the happiness of suckling their 
own children^ or who have not sufficient nourishment for 
them_, the choice of fitting food is a matter of importance. 
Custom and opinions formed at hap-hazard decide generally 
the question ; and as the simple laws of nutrition which ought 
to determine it are mostly unknown to the parties concerned, 
the bodily development of the child in its earliest youth often 
suffers considerably by the sort of food employed. It must 
be intelligible to any one, that a child deprived of its mother^s 
milk and having no wet-nurse (the choice of one being difficult 
and often attended with danger), can only be fed properly, 
when the food given is equivalent in nourishing power to that 
of womaffis milk. 
In order to form a correct notion on this point, it will 
perhaps be as well to remind my readers that milk contains 
two different matters, each essential for the performance of 
various functions in the human body. 
From the casein in the milk is formed the principal ingre- 
dient in blood, and from this the chief elements of fiesh : the 
butter and sugar of milk are requisite for various other pur- 
poses, and serve finally to produce animal heat. The food of 
man and the fodder of animals resemble milk inasmuch as 
they invariably consist of a mixture of two analogous classes, 
of matter, one of which plays the same part as the casein, the 
: other as the fat and sugar of milk; so that from the food 
taken blood and fiesh are produced, and the temperature of the 
body maintained. 
The seeds of our cereals contain a matter identical with 
curdled cheese ; the seeds of pease and beans a matter like the 
I cheese, which, as we have seen, milk also contains in a soluble 
state. 
I, In corn-fiour there is, it is true, no sugar of milk, and but 
|i little fat ; but it is rich in starch, which in the stomach is 
converted into sugar. 
i For the normal support of life, the proportion of blood and 
, heat-producing elements in food is not unimportant. In 
j order for his body to increase in weight or to grow, an 
