at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children
fed in this way less liable to colic and worms.

That need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with
worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter. [Footnote:
Women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and
cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass. This supplies vegetable
juices to their milk. There are still those species which are
unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which I very
much doubt.] Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal,
is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily
turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like
animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants.

The milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome than
the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar to its
own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction.
If quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods
produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk. If
a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian
food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, I do not think it
would be troubled with worms.

Milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to go
sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food;
whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the
array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions
which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents.
People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is
absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. This