So essential is it, that the constitution of the nurse should be sound, and her juices untainted that we have many instances of diseases being imparted from the nurse to the infant, and from the infant to the nurse. Whole villages have been infected with the venereal virus, by nurses suckling the children of other women.
Were mothers to suckle their own offspring it is probable the latter would be more strong and vigorous. The milk of a stranger must be less proper for them than that of the mother, for as the foetus is nourished in the matrix by a fluid, which bears a strong resemblance to the milk that is formed in the breasts, the infant, therefore, is already, as it were, habituated to the milk of its mother. The milk of any other woman, on the contrary, is a nourishment new to the child, and sometimes so different from the other that it is difficult to make the child take it: and if forced will sicken and languish, from not being able to digest the milk of the nurse; a circumstance which, if the consequences are not seasonably prevented by the substitution of another nurse, soon proves fatal.
I cannot help observing, that the custom of crowding a multitude of children into one place, as in the hospitals of large cities, is highly repugnant to what ought to be the grand object proposed, their preservation. The greatest part of such children fall victims to a kind of scurvy, or to other diseases, from which they might have been exempted, had they been brought up in different houses, or rather in the country. The same expence would be sufficient for their support, and an infinity of lives, in which it is well known consist the real riches of a state, would be saved.
At twelve or fifteen months infants begin to lisp. _A_ is the vowel which they articulate with most ease, as it requires nothing more than the opening of the lips, and forcing out the breath. _E_ requires that the tongue should be raised as the lips are opened; and is therefore pronounced with a degree of more trouble. _I_ is attended with greater difficulty, as in the articulation of the vowel the tongue is elevated still more, and made to approach the teeth of the upper jaw. In the pronunciation of _O_, the tongue must be lowered, and the lips contracted; and in that of _U_, the latter must be also contracted, and in some degree extended. The first consonants which children pronounce are those which require the least motion in the organs. Of these the most easy of articulation are _B_ _M_ and _P_. For that of _B_ and _P_ it is simply requisite that the lips should be closed and then opened with quickness, and for that of _M_, that they should be first opened and then closed with celerity. The articulation of the other consonants supposes motions more complicated. The pronunciation of _C_ _D_ _G_ _L_ _N_ _Q_ _R_ _S_ and _T_ depend each on a particular action of the tongue, which it would be very difficult to explain; and for the pronunciation of _F_, a more continued sound is necessary, than for that of any other consonant. _A_ being the most easily articulated of the vowels, as are _B_ _P_ and _M_, of the consonants, we need not wonder that the first words which children pronounce, in every country, should be composed of, that vowel, and of those consonants; and that, for example, in every language, _Baba_, _Mama_, _Papa_, should be the primitive articulations. They are the most familiar sounds to man, and the most natural to him, because the most easily pronounced, and the letters of which they are composed must exist wherever there is any typical mode for the denotation of sounds.