All matters bearing upon dietetics have sprung into prominence during the past ten years. Physicians have adopted the practice of recommending diet rather than medicine, and writers on domestic topics have devoted their best powers to raising the national standard of food, both in quality and modes of preparation. In spite of all this, the reforms introduced have been neither radical nor universal. Men and women still eat at express rates, devour pie, drink ice-water, and cling to the frying-pan. The national dyspepsia is yet unsubdued, and worst of all, the rising generation are planting their feet in the footprints left by their fathers and mothers.

Henry James has presented a picture of what he evidently considers the typical American boy in Daisy Miller's small brother, a portrait at which readers have alternately laughed and fumed. In either case they have been compelled to admit that the description contained elements of resemblance, although they might be overdrawn. The pertness of Randolph Miller, his total absence of respect for parent or guardian, his candy-eating propensities, and various other disagreeable traits are all familiar, though seldom all combined in the person of one child. For any and all of these faults at least nine-tenths of the blame must rest with the father and mother. Original sin and total depravity may be negatived, but a natural tendency to do wrong rather than right, cannot be denied by any one who has had much to do with young children. This acknowledged, it follows that it is the bounden duty of the guides of the little ones to do all they can to counteract this disposition in order to prevent their charges from becoming intolerable to themselves and to all about them.

In no department of the nursery is close guardianship needed more than in that of children's food. To a casual looker-on, it seems sometimes that, in becoming mothers, women must have parted with whatever atoms of common sense they once possessed. Ignorant of physiology and hygiene though they may be, ordinary observation and acquaintance with the simplest laws of nature ought to teach them something. Nevertheless, one constantly sees women who, in other directions give no evidence of being candidates for lunatic asylums, trifling with the health and life of their offspring with a recklessness that, if applied to other and less important matters, would seem nothing short of madness.

The mother of several boys was one day bemoaning to a visitor the fact that her youngest, a child of five, was subject to summer complaint. She had been up with him all the preceding night in an attack resembling cholera morbus. The scourge of cholera was in the land at the time, and the anxious parent sighed as she said she knew poor little Tom would have no chance if exposed to the disease. She had hardly finished her lament when the guest caught a glimpse of its object. The morning was a rainy one, but the child was standing nearly knee-keep in wet grass under a plum-tree in the garden, eating the unripe fruit with gusto. At her friend's exclamation of horror, the mother glanced from the window, nodded smilingly to the juvenile culprit, and said calmly, as she resumed her seat:

" I never limit the boys in their allowance of fruit. They are welcome to all they find on the ground, and the dear fellows enjoy it thoroughly."

Another child, a girl of four, is "passionately fond of pickles."

"It does no good to put them out of her reach," laughs the mother. "I did that for awhile. But after I caught her risking her neck balancing herself on two chairs and a footstool to reach the jar on the top shelf of the pantry, I thought it would be safer to keep them where she could get them without breaking any bones"

Nearly every one is acquainted with children who are as devoted to their strong tea and coffee as a regular drinker to his dram. While these beverages may be helpful in imparting temporary tone and strength to hard-worked men and women, it is a great mistake to permit a child to begin life by over-exciting his nervous system by their use. For those who do not like milk, cold water - noticed-water—should be sufficient. Thoughtless mothers often lay the foundation for this taste by pouring a few teaspoonfuls of real tea or coffee into the child's "cambric tea.''Far better is it to have it understood at the outset that such drinks are not for children, instead of pretending to humor a whim which can do no good. Nervous digestions and tempers would all be the better for the abstinence.

But it is not enough to keep from children those articles of food which will do them harm. It should be the study of the mother to select and arrange their diet with the view to giving them what they need for nourishment and growth. In this day when the dietetic schoolmaster is abroad, when lectures on cookery are delivered in every town, and the press teems with tracts and treatises upon wholesome food, there is less excuse than ever before for ignorance or neglect. Yet all the preaching and printing in the land does no good unless the mother makes the practical application of the precepts. Upon her, and upon her alone, it devolves to feed her child with food convenient (or suitable) for him. She must see that while he has starches to keep up the fires of the body, as it were, he has also nitrogenous foods that will form flesh and muscle, phosphates that will feed bone and brain, fats that will warm and nourish. For no two children can one prescribe a similar bill of fare. One demands fats, another requires albuminoids, a third needs starches. Only by patient and intelligent study and experiment can the mother learn what to choose and what to reject.

C. T. H