Instead of changing the nurse’s usual diet, I think it would be enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind.  It is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet indigestible, but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome.  Reform your cookery, use neither butter nor oil for frying.  Butter, salt, and milk should never be cooked.  Let your vegetables be cooked in water and only seasoned when they come to table.  The vegetable diet, far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful supply of milk. [Footnote:  Those who wish to study a full account of the advantages and disadvantages of the Pythagorean regime, may consult the works of Dr. Cocchi and his opponent Dr. Bianchi on this important subject.] If a vegetable diet is best for the child, how can meat food be best for his nurse?  The things are contradictory.

Fresh air affects children’s constitutions, particularly in early years.  It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has a powerful effect on their young bodies.  Its effects can never be destroyed.  So I should not agree with those who take a country woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and her nursling with her.  I would rather send him to breathe the fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town.  He will take his new mother’s position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor will follow him.  The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is not a paid servant, but the father’s friend.  But if this friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice can be followed, you will say to me, “What shall I do instead?” I have told you already—­“Do what you are doing;” no advice is needed there.

Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it.  The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become.  Disease and vice are the sure results of over-crowded cities.  Of all creatures man is least fitted to live in herds.  Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die.  Man’s breath is fatal to his fellows.  This is literally as well as figuratively true.

Men are devoured by our towns.  In a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always renewed from the country.  Send your children to renew themselves, so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities.  Women hurry home that their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children.  They would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon destroy the taste for other delights.

The new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little wine is usually added.  I think the wine might be dispensed with.  As nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely that they are of much value to her creatures.