INFANT MORTALITY
As a result of his studies of infant mortality as shown by church registration in Schleswig-Holstein, Hanssen, in Kiel, shows that in some places infant mortality was formerly lower than it is today. Eichede, with a present population of 2,900, had an infant mortality of 12 per cent. (twelve babies out of every hundred dying during the first year of life) during the period 1677-1722, as against a mortality of 14.5 per cent, for the period 1900-1912. Low rates are commonly ascribed to the wide use of breast-feeding, and the high rates to epidemics, chiefly of smallpox. It is noteworthy that apparently in former centuries the "summer peak" of infant mortality was not in evidence.It would seem that the factors of rural population and northern climate might enter into these findings, but the overwhelming importance of breast-feeding in a rural population is shown in another study, on