The other problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely
less vital: infant mortality. It is interesting
because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born
in the same way but we all die in different ways.
Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the
sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens
contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc.
by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust.
These factors, he alleged, and the revolting spectacles
offered by our streets, hideous publicity posters,
religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated
soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers,
the suspended carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors
and unfructified duennas—these, he said,
were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the
calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied,
would soon be generally adopted and all the graces
of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,
light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast
reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus
and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize
babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies
who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening
months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers
(Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises
to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected
to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline
in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect,
private or official, culminating in the exposure of
newborn infants, the practice of criminal abortion
or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although
the former (we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly
only too true the case he cites of nurses forgetting
to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity is too
rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to
look into it the wonder is that so many pregnancies
and deliveries go off so well as they do, all things
considered and in spite of our human shortcomings
which often baulk nature in her intentions. An
ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch
(Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality,
as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal
movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases
in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s
vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun
to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which
beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration
as yet unascertained. Still the plain straightforward
question why a child of normally healthy parents and
seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after
succumbs unaccountably in early childhood (though other
children of the same marriage do not) must certainly,
in the poet’s words, give us pause. Nature,
we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons
for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths
are due to some law of anticipation by which organisms
in which morbous germs have taken up their residence
(modern science has conclusively shown that only the