It must be the skilled aid of a surgeon

It must be the skilled aid of a surgeon

It must be the skilled aid of a surgeon

If help is called for at all, it must be the skilled aid of a surgeon; any other is worse than useless.

FRENCH TOY BULLDOG. "La Reine des Roses," owned by Mrs. Townsend Green.

The puppies are born singly, and if a bitch has a large litter they generally come in twos and threes, with a very short interval between the items of each brace or trio, and a long rest between the batches. The first services the mother has to render her babies are to free them from the bag of membranes in which they are born, and to bite the cord which joins each puppy to the afterbirth a fleshy substance which comes away with or shortly after it. All animals intensely dislike being watched while they perform these operations; but every bitch who is anything at all of a mother will manage them perfectly. Next comes the licking of the puppies, which have been enclosed each in its membranous bag full of liquid (the liquor amniæ), and are consequently dripping wet. Here is the crucial test: a good mother licks her babies until they are warm and dry, then feeds them, and snuggles down with them into a contented heap of intense happiness. A bad mother, on the contrary, leaves her poor infants to dry as best they can, a process which invariably ends in their developing a kind of infantile skin complaint, which appears like a scab of cheesy substance attached to the roots of the hair. It grows away with the hair by degrees, and gets well without treatment, but is ugly and disfiguring for the time being, and a sad evidence of incompetence on the part of the mother.