The Bechuanas are universally much attached to children.  A little child toddling near a party of men while they are eating is sure to get a handful of the food.  This love of children may arise, in a great measure, from the patriarchal system under which they dwell.  Every little stranger forms an increase of property to the whole community, and is duly reported to the chief—­boys being more welcome than girls.  The parents take the name of the child, and often address their children as Ma (mother), or Ra (father).  Our eldest boy being named Robert, Mrs. Livingstone was, after his birth, always addressed as Ma-Robert, instead of Mary, her Christian name.

I have examined several cases in which a grandmother has taken upon herself to suckle a grandchild.  Masina of Kuruman had no children after the birth of her daughter Sina, and had no milk after Sina was weaned, an event which usually is deferred till the child is two or three years old.  Sina married when she was seventeen or eighteen, and had twins; Masina, after at least fifteen years’ interval since she had suckled a child, took possession of one of them, applied it to her breast, and milk flowed, so that she was able to nurse the child entirely.  Masina was at this time at least forty years of age.  I have witnessed several other cases analogous to this.  A grandmother of forty, or even less, for they become withered at an early age, when left at home with a young child, applies it to her own shriveled breast, and milk soon follows.  In some cases, as that of Ma-bogosing, the chief wife of Mahure, who was about thirty-five years of age, the child was not entirely dependent on the grandmother’s breast, as the mother suckled it too.  I had witnessed the production of milk so frequently by the simple application of the lips of the child, that I was not therefore surprised when told by the Portuguese in Eastern Africa of a native doctor who, by applying a poultice of the pounded larvae of hornets to the breast of a woman, aided by the attempts of the child, could bring back the milk.  Is it not possible that the story in the “Cloud of Witnesses” of a man, during the time of persecution in Scotland, putting his child to his own breast, and finding, to the astonishment of the whole country, that milk followed the act, may have been literally true?  It was regarded and is quoted as a miracle; but the feelings of the father toward the child of a murdered mother must have been as nearly as possible analogous to the maternal feeling; and, as anatomists declare the structure of both male and female breasts to be identical, there is nothing physically impossible in the alleged result.  The illustrious Baron Humboldt quotes an instance of the male breast yielding milk; and, though I am not conscious of being over-credulous, the strange instances I have examined in the opposite sex make me believe that there is no error in that philosopher’s statement.