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    edition of mine ; hoping however that the errata of the last may be corrected- ^ „ ~ . •'" I return your note of children received in the Foundling Hos-, pital at Paris , from 1741 to 17 * 55 inclusive ^ and I have adde 4 the years preceding as far back as 1710 , together with the ge £ neral Christenings of the city ; and the years succeeding down to 1770 , Those since that period I have not been able to

    obtain . I have noted in the margin the gradual increase , viz . from every tenth child so thrown upon the public , till it eome § to every third . Fifteen years have passed since the last account , and probably it may now amount to one half . Is it right to encourage this monstrous deficiency of natural affection ? A surgeon I met with here , excused the women of Paris , by say- * ing seriously that they could not give suck , Car , dit-il > ilsrCont

    poin ' t de Tetons . He assured me it was a fact , and bad me look at them , and observe how flat they were on the breast ; they have nothing more there , says he , than I have upon the back of my hand . I have since thought that there might be some truth in his observation , and that possibly nature finding they made bo use of bubbies , has left off giving them any . Yet since

    Uousseau , with admirable eloquence pleaded for the rights op children to their mother ' s milk , the mode has changed a little ^ and some ladies of quality now suckle their infants , and find milk enough . May the mode descend to the lower ranks , till \ t becomes no longer the custom to pack their infants away , as soon as born , to the Enfans trouvBst , with the careless

    observation that , the king is better able to maintain them . I am credibly informed that nine tenths of them die there pretty soon ; which is said to be a great relief to the institution , whose funds

    -would not otherwise be sufficient to bring up the ~ remainder . Except the few persons of quality above-mentioned , and the multitude who send to the Hospital , the . practice is to hire nurses in the country to carry out the children and to take care of them there . Here is an office for examining the health qf nurses and giving them licenses . They come to town on certain days of the week in companies to receive the children , and we often meet trains of them on the road returning to the neighbouring villages with each a child inarms . But those who are good enough to try this way of raising their children ^

    f This appears to have been a favorite allusion with Dr . F . In tke beginning of his Life written by himself , supposing it possible to pass his time over again , Jie says , All I would ask , should be the privilege of an author , to correct , in a second edition , certain errors of the first . " And in his well-known Epitaph , which he wrote many years before his death , he describes himself as a work which " will appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition , corrected 2 nd amended by the Author . " i See P . 137 . fin . & note .

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    19 * Original Letters by Dr . Franklin .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1806, page 194, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1723/page/26/