All artificial foods require longer time for digestion than the food supplied by nature; and when making use of such, great care should be taken to avoid too frequent feeding.  It is absolutely essential for the perfect health of an infant as well as of grown people, that the digestive organs shall enjoy a due interval of rest between the digestion of one meal and the taking of another.  As a rule, a new-born infant may be safely fed, when using human milk, not oftener than once in every three or four hours.  When fed upon artificial food, once in five or six hours is often enough for feeding.  The intervals between meals in either case should be gradually prolonged as the child grows older.

QUANTITY OF FOOD FOR INFANTS.—­Dr. J.H.  Kellogg gives the following rules and suggestions for the feeding of infants:—­

“During the first week of a child’s life, the weight of the food given should be 1/100 of the weight of the infant at birth.  The daily additional amount of food required for a child amounts to about one fourth of a dram, or about one ounce at the end of each month.  A child gains in weight from two thirds of an ounce to one ounce per day during the first five months of its life, and an average of one half as much daily during the balance of the first year.

“From a series of tables which have been prepared, as the result of experiments carefully conducted in large lying-in establishments, we have devised this rule:—­

“To find the amount of food required by a child at each feeding during the first year of life, divide the weight of the child at birth by 100 and add to this amount 3/100 of the gain which the child has made since birth.  Take, for example, a child which weighs 7-1/2 lbs—­at birth, or 120 ounces.  Dividing by 100 we have 1.2 oz.  Estimating the weight according to the rule above given, the child at the end of nine months will have gained 210 oz.  Dividing this by 100 and multiplying by 3, we have 6.3 oz.  Adding to this our previous result, 1.3, we have 7.5 oz, as the amount of food required at each feeding at the end of nine months by a child which weighed 7-1/2 lbs. at birth.  To save mothers the trouble of making these calculations, we have prepared the following table, which will be found to hold good for the average child weighing 7-1/2 lbs. at birth.  This is rather more than the ordinary child weighs, but we have purposely chosen a large child for illustration, as it is better that the child should have a slight excess of food than too little.

AGE OF CHILD.
|1w.| 1m. |2m.|3m.|4m.|6m.|9m.|12m
Amount of each feeding in ounces...|  1| 11/2-2| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |71/2 | 9
Number of feedings.................| 10|  8  | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5
Amount of food daily, in ounces....| 10|12-16|18 |24 |30 |36 |371/2|45
Interval between feedings, in hours|  2| 21/2  | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |31/2 |31/2

“In the above table the first column represents quantities for the first week, the second for the end of the second month, the third for the end of the third month, etc.  It need not be mentioned that the change in quantity should be even more gradual than represented in the table.