nfants, or to explain how if wisely managed the child weans
itself by degrees from the bottle or the breast--the best way, be it
said, of weaning--or how by degrees it comes to its daily midday meal of
beef-tea and bread, and then, when the first grinding teeth have been
cut, to a small meat meal daily, finely minced or scraped, and so little
by little adopts the modes of living of its elders.

But, last of all, there are instances, though not so many as the public
imagine, in which the infant, in spite of most judicious management,
fails to thrive, and suffers from various disorders of its digestion.

The most unmanageable and the least hopeful of these cases are those in
which the infant is the subject of consumptive disease. It is very rare
for its symptoms, even in cases of the most marked tendency to
consumption on the part of the parents, to show themselves before the
age of three months, and I think I may add, that apart from such
tendency consumption never appears in infancy or early childhood, except
when it follows on some acute illness, such as inflammation of the
lungs, or on typhoid, or, as it is commonly called, remittent fever.

Consumption of the bowels, as it is popularly termed, may be said never
to occur in early infancy apart from consumptive disease of the lungs,
and is then always accompanied by an increase towards evening of the
temperature from its natural standard of 98.5 deg. to 100 deg.. Hence the
absence of cough and the persistence of a natural temperature may be
taken as almost conclusive evidence that there is no consumptive disease
of the bowels. Consumptive disease in infancy is invariably attended
with glandular enlargement. The glands of the bowels when irritated
always communicate their irritation to the glands in the groin and the
bend of the thigh, which are felt hard and enlarged, like little peas,
under the finger. But further, if there is real disease of the glands of
the bowels, other tiny enlarged glands will be felt, like shot, under
the skin of the belly, from which in the general progress of emaciation
the layer of fat always present in the healthy baby will already have
been removed. Besides this, too, the veins running beneath the skin
there, invisible in the healthy infant, will be seen meandering like
blue lines, and telling the story that more blood than usual flows
through them, because the diseased glands inside interfere with its
ready passage through its proper cha