The statement, reiterated so frequently, that breast-feeding of infants is superior to the best system of artificial feeding needs, however, some modification. There are many women in various parts of the world whose diets are sufficiently faulty to interfere with the secretion of milk of good quality, and they accordingly supply their babies a food which must necessarily lead to retardation of development. An extreme case was observed by Andrews in certain women in the Philippine Islands, whose infants developed paralysis and died of beri-beri. The pathological condition was due to the fact that the mothers, while nursing, restricted themselves to a diet of a deficient type.

The carnivorous mother can produce milk of good quality when her diet contains sufficient amounts of glandular organs and bone in addition to muscle, blood and fat, but not otherwise. The omnivorous mother, to which class the human mother belongs, but too frequently attempts to nurse her infant while she subsists on a diet of muscle meats, bread made from degermi-nated and decorticated cereal, and potatoes and a few other articles which have analogous dietary insufficiencies. The occasional occurrence of scurvy in breast-fed infants represents an extreme example of specific starvation of the mother for a single dietary factor, and the resulting deterioration of her nursing infant. Physicians and nurses have repeatedly reported to me their observations that many women while nursing infants take for days or weeks, diets derived in great measure from tea, toast, sugar and other articles of food equally unfit for the elaboration of milk. The nursing mother should always have a diet of a quality calculated to insure a satisfactory composition of the milk which she is to secrete. This she can best realize by including in her menus liberal amounts of milk and of salads. It is not enough for the diet to yield a proper calorific value, fur-nish protein according to the long accepted standards, and afford variety and palatability. The specific dietary properties of the food mixtures which enter into the diet are of paramount importance and must be given due and weighty consideration.

Chart 10. - The two curves in this chart serve to illustrate the remarkable superiority of whole milk as a supplement to a mixture of cereal grains, legume, seeds, tubers, and fleshy roots as compared with round steak, a muscle meat. Lot 2147 had a complex vegetable diet of the type described, supplemented with a liberal amount (10%) of beefsteak. Their growth was slow and the animals never reached the full adult size. They also developed early in life the appearance of old age. Lot 2148 had essentially the same diet but supplemented with ten per cent of whole milk powder. This served as a source of mineral salts and of fat-soluble A, in which diet 2147 was deficient, and made possible much more rapid growth, larger final size and much longer life. These curves illustrate the importance of the proper selection of food, so as to be highly satisfactory, rather than the adherence to a diet which is somewhat faulty in one or more respects.