obsolete. Cf. La Longue Voyage de Siam, Le Beau Voyage de Canada,
etc.]

You must expect great opposition from the nurses, who find a half
strangled baby needs much less watching. Besides his dirtyness is
more perceptible in an open garment; he must be attended to more
frequently. Indeed, custom is an unanswerable argument in some
lands and among all classes of people.

Do not argue with the nurses; give your orders, see them carried
out, and spare no pains to make the attention you prescribe easy in
practice. Why not take your share in it? With ordinary nurslings,
where the body alone is thought of, nothing matters so long as the
child lives and does not actually die, but with us, when education
begins with life, the new-born child is already a disciple, not
of his tutor, but of nature. The tutor merely studies under this
master, and sees that his orders are not evaded. He watches over
the infant, he observes it, he looks for the first feeble glimmering
of intelligence, as the Moslem looks for the moment of the moon's
rising in her first quarter.

We are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving
nothing. The mind, bound up within imperfect and half grown organs,
is not even aware of its own existence. The movements and cries of
the new-born child are purely reflex, without knowledge or will.

Suppose a child born with the size and strength of manhood, entering
upon life full grown like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter; such a
child-man would be a perfect idiot, an automaton, a statue without
motion and almost without feeling; he would see and hear nothing,