to judge what kinds of food are calculated to make the best blood,
bones, and muscles. She needs to have some general ideas in regard to
ways of bringing back the system from an abnormal to a healthy state;
as, for instance, equalizing the circulations. Learned professors,
women physicians, will know how to deliver courses of lectures on all
such subjects, and to tell what books have been written on them, and
where these books may be found. And, as for the absurdity of teaching
these things beforehand, compare that with the absurdity of rearing a
race to hand over to physicians and undertakers, and choose between.
And even apart from their practical bearing, why are not such items of
knowledge as well worth learning, as simply items of knowledge, as the
hundreds of others which, at present, no young woman's course can be
without? There is no doubt that if mothers were given a knowledge of
these matters beforehand, instead of being left to acquire it
experimentally, the present frightful rate of infant mortality (nearly
twenty-five per cent) would be reduced. Plenty of light has been
thrown on this subject, but the community does not receive it. Here is
some which was contributed to one of the Board of Health reports by a
physician.

"The mother," he says, "requires something more than her loving
instincts, her ready sympathies. With all her good-will and
conscientiousness, mistakes are made. The records of infant mortality
offer a melancholy illustration of the necessity of the mother's
previous preparation for the care of her children. The first-born die
in infancy in much larger proportion than their successors in the
family. The mother learns at the cost of her first child, and is
better prepared for the care of the second, and still better for the
third and fourth, whose chances of development into full life and
strength are much greater than those of the oldest brothers and