have accepted. So after a few polite attempts I gave up the idea of inducing them to come round to our rational English notions on many subjects on which they differ toto cœlo from us.
To return to the child-rearing establishments, I went over several of them, and was much struck with the completeness of the means and appliances for bringing up and educating the children. The nursery has an efficient staff of nurses, who administer to the children their natural food, or bring them up by hand in the most careful and tender manner. In the absence of cows or other animals to provide milk, the cocoa-nut trees, that grow in profusion on the land, supply any amount of the most nutritious and digestible milk, on which the infants thrive to perfection.
I learned that the child born under water does not immediately require to breathe as is the case when born in air. During foetal life it is unquestionably an aquatic animal, and if not instantly exposed to the stimulus of air, its foetal aquatic life may be prolonged for a considerable period without injury. Of course it eventually requires that its lungs should be filled with air, in order to carry on its perfect life when separated from its mother, and accordingly it is gradually taught to respire in order to enable it to assume its proper place in the scale of creation, and perform all the functions of an air-breathing animal.
The main difficulty is to get the new-born infant to breathe through the air-tubes, but the ingenuity of the people has overcome this difficulty, and from the first days of its life it can breathe the air by means of a simple and effectual mechanism as well as if it were in the air. Each room has its large air-reservoir,
