e
arise new perils for their miserable offspring. On the third day after
birth it is considered necessary to baptize the child by complete
immersion in water, from which it is held by the Russian Church to be a
sin to remove the chill. A large proportion of the deaths of infants in
the colder months of the year are attributed by native writers to this
cause.

Mothers who have been able to suckle their own children generally wean
them at the expiration of twelve months, and popular custom, which takes
rank as a superstition, has appointed two days in the year for that
purpose--one in July, the other in January. Both of these periods are
unfavorable to the child: in July the cattle are mostly afflicted with
disorders, and their milk is hurtful; in January they give but little
milk. Various devices, more or less prejudicial to health, are resorted
to by the mother to effect a purpose to which the grossest ignorance and
superstition alone impel her. One of the mildest of these is separation
from her child for a week or longer: frequently she returns to find it a
corpse.

And now let us see what sort of men are born of these overworked women.
According to the statistical tables of Brun and Zernof, the number of
persons of both sexes alive between the ages of fifteen and sixty was in
Russia only 265 in 1000; in the United States in 1870 the number was
558. In Great Britain there are 548 adults to every 1000 population, and
in Belgium 518; so that Russia, which, from the subjection of the weaker
sex and their exposure to hardship, should, according to some persons,
produce the greatest number of heroes, in fact produces but half as many
adults, heroes or otherwise, as the other countries named, where women
do but little field-labor.

Even among those who from their ages are to be classed in Russia as
productive, great allowance must be made for physical incapacity. A
large number of the men are afflicted with deformity or disease: many of
them can scarcely drag themselves along. Out of 174,000 men brought up
from the villages to recruiting centres to supply the annual contingent
(84,000 men) of 1868, more than one-fourth (44,000) were rejected for
disease and other physical defects, not inclusive of short stature. In
Prussia, the other principal European country where women are compelled
to field-work, out of every 1000 men liable to military service in 1864,
no less than 467 were rejected for disease and other physical def