d one or
two will make their appearance,--solid farinaceous matter boiled in
water, beaten through a sieve, and mixed with a small quantity of milk,
may be employed. Or tops and bottoms, steeped in hot water, with the
addition of fresh milk and loaf sugar to sweeten. And the child may
now, for the first time, be fed with a spoon.

When one or two of the large grinding teeth have appeared, the same
food may be continued, but need not be passed through a sieve. Beef tea
and chicken broth may occasionally be added; and, as an introduction to
the use of a more completely animal diet, a portion, now and then, of a
soft boiled egg; by and by a small bread pudding, made with one egg in
it, may be taken as the dinner meal.

Nothing is more common than for parents during this period to give
their children animal food. This is a great error. "To feed an infant
with animal food before it has teeth proper for masticating it, shows a
total disregard to the plain indications of nature, in withholding such
teeth till the system requires their assistance to masticate solid
food. And the method of grating and pounding meat, as a substitute for
chewing, may be well suited to the toothless octogenarian, whose
stomach is capable of digesting it; but the stomach of a young child is
not adapted to the digestion of such food, and will be disordered by
it."[FN#10]

[FN#10] Sir James Clarke on Consumption.

"If the principles already laid down be true, it cannot reasonably be
maintained that a child's mouth without teeth, and that of an adult,
furnished with the teeth of carnivorous and graminivorous animals, are
designed by the Creator for the same sort of food. If the mastication
of solid food, whether animal or vegetable, and a due admixture of
saliva, be necessary for digestion, then solid food cannot be proper,
when there is no power of mastication. If it is swallowed in large
masses it cannot be masticated at all, and will have but a small chance
of being digested; and in an undigested state it will prove injurious
to the stomach and to the other organs concerned in digestion, by
forming unnatural compounds. The practice of giving solid food to a
toothless child, is not less absurd, than to expect corn to be ground
where there is no apparatus for grinding it. That which would be
considered as an evidence of idiotism or insanity in the last instance,
is defended and practised in the former. If, on the other hand, to
obviate t