due to want of perseverance rather than to
the absolute uselessness of the measure.

=Premature Birth.=--In spite of very extraordinary exceptions, it may be
laid down as a rule that children born before the completion of six and
a half months of pregnancy do not survive. After that date, each
additional week adds greatly to the chances of the child living. There
is a mistaken idea, founded on a superstition connected with the number
seven, that a seven-months child is more likely to survive than one born
at the eighth month. But this notion is as destitute of support in fact
as it is opposed to common sense, and the nearer any woman has
approached the full term of forty weeks of pregnancy, the greater are
the chances of her child being born alive and healthy.

The premature child is by no means necessarily still-born. It breathes,
but does so imperfectly, so that air does not enter all the smaller
air-cells; and its voice is a whimper rather than a cry. Those changes
in the heart and large vessels, which prepare, as pregnancy draws to a
close, for the altered course of the blood when the child has to breathe
through the lungs, are too little advanced for it to bear well the
sudden alteration in its mode of being. The feebly beating heart and the
not completely developed lungs seem but imperfectly to maintain the
bodily heat. The glands of the stomach and intestines are not yet fit to
perform digestion properly, while the muscular power is too feeble for
the effort at sucking. Everything is sketched out, but to nothing has
the finishing touch been put, and hence the frail machinery too often
breaks down, in the endeavour to discharge its functions.

It is surprising, however, with what rapidity Nature in some instances
perfects the work which she has been called on prematurely to perform.

It is our business to second Nature's endeavours. First of all, and of
most importance, is the duty of providing from without the warmth which
the child is unable to generate. When very feeble, it must, even without
any previous washing or dressing, be at once wrapped in cotton wool, and
then in a hot blanket, and surrounded with hot-water bottles. A tin
stomach-warmer filled with hot water is very convenient to place under
the blanket on which the child lies. Being too feeble to suck, it must
be fed, a few drops at a time, from a small spoon; or still better, if
it is able to make any effort at sucking, it may draw its nourishment