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20 days, provided the midwife or doctor has ceased attending. With each mother is left a printed
card of instructions, which are fully explained on the first visit. The second visit, which is timed
under the present arrangement to take place at the age of three months, is made with a view to
ascertaining whether the instructions given are being acted upon. Where the child is unsatisfactory
or the mother is in need of further advice in infant management, interim visits between the
ages of one and three months are paid according to the necessities of each case. The total number
of infants visited was 1,968, and the total number of visits and re-visits mounted to 4,018.

In no less than 139 out of 987 homes visited the husband was out of work. Of the mothers,
130 had been employed in laundries and 23 in dressmaking or other trades during pregnancy.
During the latter half of the year 56 necessitous cases were referred to the Charity Organisation
Society, and 40 mothers were recommended to the cheap dinners provided in the Bramley Road
for nursing women of the poorest class.
Valuable help is rendered by various voluntary agencies. For the Kensington Health Society
Dr. Carter holds weekly infant consultations in the Norland Ward. The number of mothers
advised during a year averages 160, the number of attendancies in a year being 580. In the same
ward a society, presided over by Mrs. Prideaux, provides fifty dinners daily for expectant and
nursing mothers, the charge made being 1d. a meal. St. James's Nursery, under the exceptionally
capable Management of Mrs. O'Dell, takes in fifteen babies daily, and provides dinners for mothers
who come from their work to nurse their babies in the dinner hour. Payment for the babies taken
in is insisted on. In Golborne Ward, where work of the kind was much needed, Miss Burness,
with a committee of ladies, has established infant consultations in connection with dinners for
necessitous nursing mothers, advice in infant management being given by Dr. Warner. The
voluntary workers of the Health Society have also done valuable work in visiting mothers referred
to them by the Public Health Department as requiring periodical supervision in the management
of their infants.
With these societies the Council's visitors work under a scheme of co-operation which cannot
fail to enhance the value of official and voluntary effort alike, and to bring about a material
improvement in the physique of the children of the poorer classes.
Children Act, 1908.—The provisions of this Act, which supersedes the Infant Life
Protection Act, 1897, came into force on 1st April, 1909. In future foster mothers will be under
the supervision of the inspectors of the London County Council, even if they take in only one child
"for reward" for a longer period than forty-eight hours. The premises where children are received
must be sanitary, and the persons in whose care they are placed must be fit to have the care of
infants. Similar supervision over persons who take in children for reward by the day is urgently
needed in Kensington.