height and weight; conversion of the elements of bone
into bone itself, formation of muscle out of the fat, which in the young
child was stored up as so much building material for an edifice in
course of construction, require for their accomplishment perfect health,
and the power of converting to its highest purposes all the nourishment
received. What wonder then, if from time to time, the machinery thus
hardly taxed, fails to be quite equal to the demands upon it, if pains
in the limbs--growing pains, as they are commonly called, or head-ache,
tell of the inadequate nerve supply. Or if from the same cause, a vague
feverish condition comes on, in which the temperature is slightly
raised, and the child listless, and yet fretful, loses its cheerfulness,
is dull at its easy tasks, and yet indifferent to play. This too is the
time when any unsuspected defects, physical, or mental, or moral, begin
to show themselves distinctly; when short sight becomes apparent so soon
as the child has to learn its letters, when the dull hearing is
perceived which makes it seem inattentive, and gives to its manner an
unchildlike nervousness; and the weak intellect is displayed in
causeless laughter, causeless mischief, causeless passion, imperfect
power of articulation, or want of words, and by a restless busyness in
doing nothing.

Of all these things I shall have to speak later on more fully. They are
the things however, which only those mothers notice who live much with
their children, who do not banish them all day long to the nursery or
the school-room, and learn from another whether they fare well or ill.
They and only they will notice these things in whom there dwells that
which the poet tells us of:

The mother's love that grows
From the soft child, to the strong man; now soft,
Now strong as either, and still one sole same love.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The exact numbers as given at p. xiv of the forty-fifth Report of
the Registrar-General for all England in 1881 are to 1,000 living under
one year 58 deaths; from one to five 6.1; from five to ten 3.3.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DISORDERS AND DISEASES OF THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM.

It is stated on good authority[11] that more than half of the deaths at
all ages from these causes take place in children under five years, a
fact which at first sight seems as inexplicable as it is startling.
There is, however, a twofold explanation of it: the circulation th