[Greek:  Ouch ara soi ge pataer aen ippora Paeleus Oude Thetis maetaer,
  glaukae de d etikte thalassa Petrai t aelibatoi, hoti toi noos estin
  apaenaes.]

  Mr. SPECTATOR,

As your Paper is Part of the Equipage of the Tea-Table, I conjure you to print what I now write to you; for I have no other Way to communicate what I have to say to the fair Sex on the most important Circumstance of Life, even the Care of Children.  I do not understand that you profess your Paper is always to consist of Matters which are only to entertain the Learned and Polite, but that it may agree with your Design to publish some which may tend to the Information of Mankind in general; and when it does so, you do more than writing Wit and Humour.  Give me leave then to tell you, that of all the Abuses that ever you have as yet endeavoured to reform, certainly not one wanted so much your Assistance as the Abuse in [nursing [1]] Children.  It is unmerciful to see, that a Woman endowed with all the Perfections and Blessings of Nature, can, as soon as she is delivered, turn off her innocent, tender, and helpless Infant, and give it up to a Woman that is (ten thousand to one) neither in Health nor good Condition, neither sound in Mind nor Body, that has neither Honour nor Reputation, neither Love nor Pity for the poor Babe, but more Regard for the Money than for the whole Child, and never will take further Care of it than what by all the Encouragement of Money and Presents she is forced to; like AEsop’s Earth, which would not nurse the Plant of another Ground, altho never so much improved, by reason that Plant was not of its own Production.  And since anothers Child is no more natural to a Nurse than a Plant to a strange and different Ground, how can it be supposed that the Child should thrive? and if it thrives, must it not imbibe the gross Humours and Qualities of the Nurse, like a Plant in a different Ground, or like a Graft upon a different Stock?  Do not we observe, that a Lamb sucking a Goat changes very much its Nature, nay even its Skin and Wooll into the Goat Kind?  The Power of a Nurse over a Child, by infusing into it, with her Milk, her Qualities and Disposition, is sufficiently and daily observed:  Hence came that old Saying concerning an ill-natured and malicious Fellow, that he had imbibed his Malice with his Nurses Milk, or that some Brute or other had been his Nurse.  Hence Romulus and Remus were said to have been nursed by a Wolf, Telephus the Son of Hercules by a Hind, Pelias the Son of Neptune by a Mare, and AEgisthus by a Goat; not that they had actually suck’d such Creatures, as some Simpletons have imagin’d, but that their Nurses had been of such a Nature and Temper, and infused such into them.

Many Instances may be produced from good Authorities and daily Experience, that Children actually suck in the several Passions and depraved