to which our infantile diseases of the summer months, usually attributed to irregularities and indiscretions in diet, are somewhat analogous, affords the strongest exemplification of the effect of continued heat on the functions of the skin and internal organs sympathizing with it. The European who retreats from the scorching rays of a tropical sun to seek repose under his net in the shade, falls a victim to disease; while the native Hindoo who toils all the day, owes his comparative immunity, not so much to a constitution framed to the climate, as to his frequent ablutions and daily inunctions of rancid oil. And though the one be a religious rite, and the other an expedient to protect him from swarms of insects, they both combine to preserve an equable excitement in the vessels of the skin. And were it not that his ingenuity has supplied this latter substitute, mosquitoes and cock-roaches would be as well entitled to his homage as the consecrated waters of the Ganges.

The sustenance of the infant for nearly the first year of its life should be drawn exclusively from its mother. This is nature's provision; and ordinarily the supply is commensurate to the demand; and for this no artificial combination is an adequate substitute. Nature, too, has wisely placed this secretion beyond the influence of ordinary indisposition; and though there are instances of

real, constitutional inability, a mother, generally speaking, is competent to perform the kindly offices of nurse. Happily our country women, with but few exceptions, have not arrived at that maximum of refinement which prompts them to alienate their children. And if there be living a female who can unnecessarily and most unnaturally resolve to relinquish the important duties, and to forego the endearing pleasures of a mother, and to abandon her helpless offspring to the carelessness and cupidity of an hireling,

"Hear, nature, hear! suspend thy purpose, if
Thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility!

Dry up in her the organs of increase,

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honor her.”

At the period of ablactation it is only necessary to avoid great and sudden changes in diet. The digestion of the child is rapid, and its calls for food consequently frequent; and so it be but plain and bland, indulgence may be safely allowed.— Nature unhackneyed seldom errs in her demands; and if the appetite is not pampered, no limits need be set to time or quantity in its gratification.Contrast, now, these plain and obviously natural rules with the practices which too generally prevail in the management of infancy. Sanis omnia sana,' would seem to be an adopted axiom; and a

most pernicious one it is. From the moment of birth up to the period we are considering, the wailings of infancy are quieted with diffusiblesits clamors are hushed by epicurean indulgencies -and its very smiles are purchased by an enormous tax to the confectioner. Hence follows a long train of functional disorders of the digestive organs, by which, if life is not destroyed, the growth is checked; the constitution is impaired ; and very frequently structural disease is superinduced which no art afterwards can remedy; and hence, too, by reverse sympathy, springs a tribe of eruptive diseases so loathsome and so common to early life.

Nor do the evils of early mismanagement in relation to diet stop here. The moralist would follow up consequences to a later period, and tell you that tastes and appetites, vitiated and depraved in the cradle, go on step by step, from year to year, until they terminate, at length, in that most odious, degrading and disgusting of all vices,-in our country "the pestilence that walketh by noonday" -beastly inebriety.

The health of the infant depends on the equable evolution and perfect integrity of its several organs-to which exercise of body, both passive and active, greatly conduces. In the first months of existence it must necessarily be passive; but when locomotion is acquired it may well be left

to the buoyancy of infant feeling. The gambols of childhood should be rarely repressed-and when properly clothed and properly fed, it will brave with comparative impunity the most incleWhen situation or circumstances

ment seasons.

forbid the indulgence of active exercises abroad, the shower-bath, the bathing-tub, and the fleshbrush at home will almost compensate for the deprivation.

"Certain physical and moral differences that present themselves in man, and which depend on the diversity of the proportions and connexion between the parts forming their organization, as well as the different degrees of energy relative to certain organs," have been fancifully named by Physiologists-Temperaments. A knowledge of the differences or "peculiar dispositions of the body with which we are born, is of little practical value; as by education, manner of living, climate, or acquired habits, they become altered or totally changed." "Man never remains in a state of nature, being acted on by every surrounding body; his physical qualities, therefore, if observed at distant periods of life, present as many differences as his moral or intellectual character."

By another physiological subtlety, this generic name, which is made to imply a constitutional liability to a certain cast of diseases, has undergone a subdivision, and hereditary predisposition

to disease from peculiar individual organization is called Idiosyncracy. The opinion I am

aware

very generally obtains that diseases are propagated from parents to their offspring; and to a certain extent it cannot, perhaps, be denied. But reasons enough do exist to justify a suspicion at least that idiosyncracy is often but another name for habit.

The arthritic entails the gout upon his heirbut it may be by bequeathing with his wealth the very errors of physical education that engendered the disease in his own person. There is a concurrence, too, of all authority in the remark, that, now and then, a generation springs up among the most predisposed that enjoys a perfect immunity from disease; and which might be traced, possibly, either to the wisdom that devised or the necessity which enforced an improvement in physical education.

The fearful increase of pulmonary consumption, a disease which Pathologists have identified with scrophula, gives to this subject additional interest. I speak not of diseases often confounded with consumption, whose cure has inspired the ignorant with confidence and given to a thousand nostrums an ephemeral celebrity;-but whoever has watched the insidious approach of tubercular phthisis to its developement upon the lungs-and who of you has not?-and has experienced, too,