lioness, the panther, and other such ferocious animals, nourish their offspring with their own milk; and shall the mothers of the human race be less affectionate than the dams of all these? Does not God himself indicate this very thing in the lamentations of Jeremiah, saying, “The dragons make bare the breast and suckle their young; the daughter of my people is cruel as the ostrich in the desert.” How, I pray, can it agree with nature that they should thrust from themselves that which is a part of themselves?—that they should at last withdraw the milk from their own offspring, which during so many months they bore and nourished beneath their hearts? God certainly gave not the milk for the use of the mothers, but of the children; for those fountains never spring up save when offspring come to life: for whose sake then are they, unless they be for the new guests? They, therefore, who can and do not suckle their own offspring, invert the Divine arrangements and transfer them to a different purpose than that for which they were designed.
8. Secondly, it contributes much to the health of the infants that they suckle the breast of their real mother, rather than of another; inasmuch as before birth they were nourished with the maternal blood, daily experience witnesses that children might approach nearer to the dispositions and virtues of their parents than generally happens. Favorinus, not among the least celebrated of philosophers, shows, that as the milk of animals, by some occult virtue, possesses the power of fashioning the body and mind according to the form of its original; and this he demonstrates by citing the case of lambs and kids, saying, “That lambs, nourished with the milk of goats, have milk much weaker than those sustained by the milk of the mother; on the contrary, kids nourished with the milk of sheep have wool much softer than those nourished by the milk of their dams.” Who, then, unless he be blind, does not observe that infants, with
