The sense of taste is as acute as all other sensations.  If the child is bottle-fed, the slightest change in diet is resented because of the unfamiliar taste, and the whole may promptly be rejected.  The tendency to dyspeptic symptoms is apt to lead to much unwise changing of the diet, and everything tried falls in turn into disrepute, until perhaps all rational diets are abandoned, and some mixture of very faulty construction, because of its temporary or accidental success, becomes permanently adopted—­a mixture perhaps so deficient in some necessary constituent that, if it is persisted with, permanent damage to the growth of the child results.  We must pay less attention to changes of diet and explore our management of the child to try and find how we can make his environment more restful.

It is wise to accustom a nervous child from a very early age to take a little water or fruit juice from a spoon every day.  Otherwise when breast-feeding or bottle-feeding is abandoned one may meet with the most formidable resistance.  Infants of a few months can be easily taught; the resistance of a child of nine months or a year may be difficult to overcome.  The difficulty of weaning from the breast recurs with great constancy in nervous children.  By this time the influence of environment has become clearly apparent.  The child is often enough already master of the situation, and is conscious of his power.  Such children will sometimes prefer to starve for days together, obstinately opposing all attempts to get them to drink from a spoon, a cup, or even a bottle.  When this happens, sometimes the only effective way is to change the environment and to send the baby to a grandmother or an aunt, where in new surroundings and with new attendants the resistance which was so strong at home may completely disappear.  When weaning is resented, and difficulties of this sort arise, it is clear that the mother, whose breast is close at hand, is at a great disadvantage in combating the child’s opposition.

For nervous infants, alas! broken sleep is the rule.  What, then, is to be done?  It is astonishing to me that any one who has studied the behaviour of only a few of these nervous and restless infants should uphold the teaching that the crying of the young infant is a bad habit, and that the mother who is truly wise must neglect the cry and leave him to learn the uselessness of his appeals.  It is true that the youngest child readily contracts habits good or bad.  Either he will learn the habit of sleep or the habit of crying.  Mercifully the inclination of the majority is towards sleep.  But to encourage habits of restlessness and crying there is no surer way than to follow this bad advice and to permit the child to cry till he is utterly exhausted in body and in mind.  It is unwise always to rock a baby to sleep; it is also unwise to allow him to scream himself into a state of hysteria.  A quiet, darkened room, the steady pressure of the mother’s hand in some rhythmical