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Remember excoriations are generally owing to the want of water—to the want of an abundance of water. An infant who is every morning well soused and well swilled with water, seldom suffers either from excoriations or from any other of the numerous skin diseases. Cleanliness, then, is the grand preventive of, and the best remedy for, excoriations. Naaman the Syrian was ordered “to wash and be clean,” and he was healed, “and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” This was, of course, a miracle; but how often does water, without any special intervention, act miraculously both in preventing and in curing skin diseases!

An infant’s clothes, napkins especially, ought never to be washed with soda; the washing of napkins with soda is apt to produce excoriations and breakings-out. “As washerwomen often deny that they use soda, it can be easily detected by simply soaking a clean napkin in fresh water and then tasting the water; if it be brackish and salt, soda has been employed.” [Communicated by Sir Charles Locock to the Author.]