egins to walk, or to use its limbs, they
bend under the weight of the body, or under their own weight, and with
every slight movement which its feeble muscular power enables it to
make. It does more, however, than interfere with the hardening of the
limbs: it arrests growth to a great degree, interferes with
development, retards teething, postpones the closure of the open part of
the head, or fontanelle, weakens constitutional vigour, and impairs
muscular power. To this feeble muscular power it is due that the child
cannot make the effort to fill its lungs completely, and hence the
pressure of the external air forces the soft ribs inwards, and gives to
the chest the peculiar form of pigeon-breast. In the course of time the
delayed bone-formation takes place, and the bones themselves become as
hard as ivory, but the limbs do not straighten, and the deformity
produced in infancy is but confirmed in after-life.

The greater degrees of rickets are scarcely ever seen among the children
of the wealthier classes, but over-crowded and ill-ventilated nurseries,
cots from which the air is well-nigh shut out by closed sides and
overhanging curtains; injudicious feeding, with undue preponderance of
farinaceous food, often produce its slighter forms. I never yet saw
rickets in a child while brought up exclusively at its mother's breast.

The slighter forms of rickets show themselves in a tardy closure of the
infant's head, which sweats profusely when the child is laid down to
sleep; in big wrists, which contrast with the attenuated arms; in a
general limpness of the whole body, and a bowing of the back under the
weight of the head, which bends as a green stick would bend if a weight
were placed upon it. They are further marked by backwardness in
teething, and by the irregular order in which the teeth appear, and,
further, by the peculiar narrowness of the chest, and by what has been
termed the beading of the ends of the ribs: little round prominences due
to a heaping up of gristle just where the ribs join on to the
breastbone, marking the spots at which the tardy bone-making has come to
a standstill.

Children who bear these stamps of rickets are far more apt than others
to suffer from spasmodic croup, and in them it is also specially likely
to be severe and to be accompanied by convulsions. They will also be
more liable than others to attacks of bronchitis, they will suffer more
during teething, they will be often constipated, an