weather demands it, actually produces the effect here
supposed; but to endure severe cold, on the contrary, never hardens
anybody. Nay, more, it enfeebles. Cold, when combined with the evils of
_poverty_, produces more mischief and destroys more lives than any one
disease in the whole catalogue of human maladies.

Adam Smith says that it is not uncommon for mothers in the Highlands of
Scotland, who have borne twenty children, to have only two of them
alive.

It may be difficult to say whether children are oftener destroyed by
over-tenderness than by neglect, and the evils incident to poverty. Both
extremes are common; while the happy medium--that of conducting a
child's education upon the principles of physiology, is rarely known,
and still more rarely followed.

I have been much amused, and not a little instructed, by the following
anecdote on this point, from Dr. Dewees:

We were speaking with a lady who had lost three or four children with
"croup," who informed us she was convinced, from absolute experiment,
that there was nothing like exposure to all kinds of weather to protect
and harden the system. By her first plan of managing her children, which
was by keeping them very warmly clad, she said she lost several by the
croup; but since she had adopted the opposite scheme, her children had
been perfectly healthy, and never had betrayed the slightest disposition
to that terrible disease which had robbed her of her children.

Perhaps, madam, we observed, you did not, in making your first
experiments, attend to a number of details which might be thought
essential to the plan. You did not probably take the proper precautions
when you sent them into the cold air, or observe what was important for
them when they returned from it.

"Oh, yes," she replied, "I took every possible care when they, were
going out. I always made them wear a very warm great coat, well lined
with baize, and a fur cape or collar. I always made them wear a
'comfortable' round their necks, made of soft woollen yarn. And as for
their feet, they were always protected by socks or over-shoes lined with
wool or fur, as the weather might be wet or dry."

Do you believe, madam, they were kept at a proper degree of warmth by
these means?

"Oh, certainly. Indeed, rather too warm; for they would often be in a
state of perspiration, they told me, when in the open air; especially if
they ran, slid, or skated."

And what was done when they were thus he