If the attention of the mother were necessary nowhere else, it would be indispensable in the application of this article.  If she do not take special pains to prevent it, the erring though well meaning nurse may so compress the body with the bandage as to produce pain and uneasiness, and sometimes severe colic.  Nay, worse evils than even this have been known to arise.  When a child sneezes, or coughs, or cries, the abdomen should naturally yield gently; but if it is so confined that it cannot yield where the band is applied, it will yield in an unnatural proportion below, to the great danger of producing a species of rupture, no less troublesome than the one which such tight swathing is designed to prevent.

But besides the bandage already mentioned, no other restraint of the body and limbs of a child is at all admissible.  The Creator has kindly ordained that the human body and limbs, and especially its muscles, or moving powers, shall be developed by exercise.  Confine an arm or a leg, even in a child of ten years of age, and the limb will not increase either in strength or size as it otherwise would, because its muscles are not exercised; and the fact is still more obvious in infancy.

There is a still deeper evil.  On all the limbs are fixed two sets of muscles; one to extend, the other to draw up or bend the limb.  If you keep a limb extended for a considerable time, you weaken the one set of muscles; if you keep it bent, you weaken the other.  This weakness may become so great that the limb will be rendered useless.  There are cases on record—­well authenticated—­where children, by being obliged to sit in one place on a hard floor, have been made cripples for life.  Hundreds of others are injured, though they may not become absolutely crippled.

I repeat it, therefore, their dress should be so free and loose that they may use their little limbs, their neck and their bodies, as much as they please; and in every desired direction.  The practices of confining their arms while they lie down, for fear they should scratch themselves with their nails, and of pinning the clothes round their feet, are therefore highly reprehensible.  Better that they should even occasionally scratch themselves with their nails, than that they should be made the victims of injurious restraint.  Who would think of tying up or muffling the young lamb or kid?  And even the young plant—­what think you would be the effect, if its leaves and branches could not move gently with the soft breezes?  Would the fluids circulate, and health be promoted:  or would they stagnate, and a morbid, sickly and dwarfish state be the consequence?

Those whose object is to make infancy, as well as any other period of existence, a season of happiness, will not fail to find an additional motive for giving the little stranger entire freedom in the land whither he has so recently arrived, especially when he seems to enjoy it so much.  Who can be so hardened as to confine him, unless compelled by the most pressing necessity?