that if they should take charge of their children, they may lose something of their symmetry or elegance of form. It frequently happens, on the contrary, that they incur the loss, not only of their customary rest and beauty, but also of their health; since, when they reject their own sucking infants, they reject their physicians, who usually free the mothers of superfluous humors and occult diseases,—as the philosopher, Favorinus, has shown at considerable length. Plutarch[1] deemed it necessary to compose a book for the especial purpose of counselling mothers in the duties to which by God and nature they are destined; and Aulus Gellius has left it upon record “that such women are not worth the name of mothers who decline the fulfillment of what God; and nature enjoined upon them; and for such he anticipates evils of every kind.”
10. Fourthly, it violates maternal honor for mothers to refuse the breasts to their own children.[2] Didacus Apolephtes calls such not mothers, but step-mothers, saying, that many prefer the burdens of wealth rather than to carry their own offspring in their bosom; and many blush more at carrying their own offspring, than a dog or a squirrel in their arms. What animal, I pray, is so savage as to entrust its own young to others? Nay, a race of animals is said to exist in which the male contests with the female for the privilege of caring for the offspring. Birds, likewise, although they occasionally produce six and more young ones at a time, and God has not supplied them with milk for their offspring, yet they do not desert them, but feed and cherish them with all possible care.
