frail beings are doing wonderfully well, thanks to the assiduous care
bestowed upon them, and are even showing, it appears, a true emulation
to become persons of importance.

Every one now knows the incubator or "artificial hen"--that box with a
glass top in which, under the influence of a mild heat, hens' eggs,
laid upon wire cloth, hatch of themselves in a few days, and allow
pretty little chicks to make their way out of the cracked shell.

This ingenious apparatus, which has been adopted by most breeders,
gives so good results that it has already supplanted the mother hens
in all large poultry yards, and at present, thanks to it, large
numbers of eggs that formerly ended in omelets are now changing into
chickens.

Although not belonging to the same race, a number of children at their
birth are none the less delicate than these little chicks.

There are some that are so puny and frail among the many brought into
the world by the anæmic and jaded women of the present generation
that, in the first days of their existence, their blood, incapable of
warming them, threatens at every instant to congeal in their veins.
There are some which, born prematurely, are so incapable of taking
nourishment of themselves, of breathing and of moving, that they would
be fatally condemned to death were not haste made to take up their
development where nature left it, in order to carry it on and finish
it. In such a case it is not, as might be supposed, to the
exceptionally devoted care of the mother that the safety of these
delicate existences is confided. As the sitting hen often interferes
with the hatching of her eggs by too much solicitude, so the most