Children’s Sensibility.

In passing from a study of children’s ideas to an investigation of their feelings, we seem to encounter quite another kind of problem. A child has the germs of ideas long before he can give them clear articulate expression; and, as we have seen, he has at first to tax his ingenuity in order to convey by intelligible signs the thoughts which arise in his mind. For the manifestation of his feelings of pleasure and pain, on the other hand, nature has endowed him with adequate expression. The states of infantile discontent and content, misery and gladness, pronounce themselves with a clearness and an emphasis which leave no room for misunderstanding.

This full frank manifestation of feeling holds good more especially of those states of bodily comfort and discomfort which make up the first rude experiences of life. It is necessary for the child’s preservation that he should be able to announce by clear signals the oncoming of his cravings and of his sufferings, and we all know how well nature has provided for this necessity. Hence the fulness with which infant psychology has dealt with this first chapter of the life of feeling. Preyer, for example, gives a full and almost exhaustive epitome of the various shades of infantile pleasure and pain which grow out of this life of sense and appetite, and has carefully described their physiological accompaniments and their signatures.^[126]

When we pass from these elementary forms of pleasure and pain to the rudiments of emotion proper, as the miseries of fear, the sorrows and joys of the affections, we have still, no doubt, to do with a mode of manifestation which, on the whole, is direct and unreserved to a gratifying extent. A child of three is delightfully incapable of the skilful repressions, and the yet more skilful simulations of emotion which are easy to the adult.^[127] Yet frank and transparent as is the first instinctive utterance of feeling, it is apt to get checked at an early date, giving place to a certain reserve. So that, as we know from published reminiscences of childhood, a child of six will have learnt to hide some of his deepest feelings from unsympathetic eyes.

This shyness of the young heart, face to face with old and strange ways of feeling, exposed to ridicule if not to something worse, makes the problem of registering the pulsations of its emotions more difficult than it at first seems. As a matter of fact we are still far from knowing the precise range and depth of children’s feelings. This is seen plainly enough in the quite opposite views which are entertained of childish sensibility, some describing it as restricted and obtuse, others as morbidly excessive. Such diversity of view may no doubt arise from differences in the fields of observation, since, as we know, children differ hardly less than adults perhaps in breadth and fineness of emotional susceptibility. Yet I think that this contrariety of view points further to the conclusion that we are still far from sounding with finely measuring scientific apparatus the currents of childish emotion.

It seems, then, to be worth while to look further into the matter in the hope of gaining a deeper and fuller insight, and as a step in this direction I propose to inquire into the various forms and the causes of one of the best marked and most characteristic of children’s feelings—namely, fear.

That fear is one of the characteristic feelings of the child needs no proving. It seems to belong to these wee, weakly things, brought face to face with a new strange world, to tremble. They are naturally timid, as all that is weak and ignorant in nature is apt to be timid.

I have said that fear is well marked in the child. Yet, though it is true that fully developed fear or terror shows itself by unmistakable signs, there are many cases where it is difficult to say whether the child is the subject of this feeling. Thus it is doubtful whether the tremblings and disturbances of respiration which are said to betray fear in the new-born infant are a full expression of this state.^[128] Again, the reflex movement of a start on hearing a sound hardly amounts to the full reaction of fear, though it is akin to it.^[129] A child may, further, show a sort of Æsthetic dislike for an ugly form or sound, turning away in evident aversion, and yet not be afraid in the full sense. Fear proper betrays itself in the stare, the grave look, and in such movements as turning away and hiding the face against the nurse’s or mother’s shoulder, and sometimes in covering it with the hands. In severer forms it leads to trembling and to wild shrieking. Changes of colour also occur. It is commonly said that great fear produces paleness; but according to one of my correspondents who has had considerable experience, a child may show the feeling by his face turning scarlet. Fear, if not very intense, leads to voluntary movements, as turning away, putting the object aside, or moving away. In its more violent forms, however, it paralyses the child. It is desirable that parents should carefully observe and describe the first signs of fear in their children.^[130]

Startling Effect of Sounds.

It may be well to begin our study of fear by a reference to the effect of startling. As is well known, sudden and loud sounds, as that of a door banging, will give a shock to an infant in the first weeks of life, which though not amounting to fear is its progenitor. A clearer manifestation occurs when a new and unfamiliar sound calls forth the grave look, the trembling lip, and possibly the fit of crying. Darwin gives an excellent example of this. He had, he tells us, been accustomed to make all sorts of sudden noises with his boy, aged four and a half months, which were well received; but one day having introduced a new sound, that of a loud snoring, he found that the child was quite upset, bursting out into a fit of crying.^[131]

As this incident suggests, it is not every new sound which is thus disconcerting to the little stranger. Sudden sharp sounds of any kind seem to be especially disliked, as those of a dog’s bark. The child M. burst out crying on first hearing the sound of a baby rattle; and she did the same two months later on accidentally ringing a hand bell. Louder and more voluminous sounds, too, are apt to have an alarming effect. The big noise of a factory, of a steam-ship, of a passing train, are among the sounds assigned by my correspondents as causes of this early startling and upsetting effect. A little girl when taken into the country at the age of nine months, though she liked the animals she saw on the whole, showed fear by seeking shelter against the nurse’s shoulder, on hearing the bleating of the sheep. So strong is this effect of suddenness and volume of sound that even musical sounds often excite some alarm at first. ‘He (a boy of four months) cried when he first heard the piano,’ writes one lady, and this is but a sample of many observations. A child of five and a half months showed such a horror of a banjo that he would scream if it were played or only touched. Preyer’s boy at sixteen months was apparently alarmed when his father, in order to entertain him, produced what seems to us a particularly pure musical tone by rubbing a drinking-glass. He remarks that this same sound had been produced when the child was four months old without any ill effects.^[132]

This last fact suggests that such shrinkings from sound may be developed at a comparatively late date. This idea is supported by other observations. “From about two years four months (writes a mother) to the present time (two years eleven months), he has shown signs of fear of music. At two years five months he liked some singing of rounds, but when a fresh person with a stronger voice than the rest joined, he begged the singer to stop. Presently he tolerated the singing as long as he might stand at the farthest corner of the room.” This child was also about the same time afraid of the piano, and of the organ, when played by his mother in a church.

It is worth noting that animals show a similar dread of musical sounds. I took a young cat of about eight weeks in my lap and struck some chords not loudly on the piano. It got up, moved uneasily from side to side, then bolted to the corner of the room and seemed to try to get up the walls. Dogs, too, certainly seem to be put out, if not to experience fear, at the music of a brass band.

It is sometimes supposed that this startling effect of loud sounds is wholly an affair of nervous disturbance:^[133] but the late development of the repugnance in certain cases seems to show that this is not the only cause at work. Of course a child’s nervous organisation may through ill health become more sensitive to this disturbing effect; and, as the life of Chopin tells us, the delicate organisation of a future musician may be specially subject to these shocks. Yet I suspect that vague alarm at the unexpected and unknown takes part here. There is something uncanny to the child in the very production of sound from a silent thing. A banjo lying now inert, harmless, and then suddenly firing off a whole gamut of sound may well shock a small child’s preconceptions of things. The second time that fear was observed in one child at the age of ten months, it was excited by a new toy which squeaked on being pressed.^[134] This seems to be another example of the disconcerting effect of the unexpected. In other cases the alarming effect of the mystery is increased by the absence of all visible cause. One little boy of two years used to get sadly frightened at the sound of the water rushing into the cistern which was near his nursery. The child was afraid at the same time of thunder, calling it ‘water coming’.

I am far from saying that all children manifest this fear of sounds. Miss Shinn points out that her niece was from the first pleased with the piano, and this is no doubt true of many children. Children behave very differently towards thunder, some being greatly disturbed by it, others being rather delighted. Thus Preyer’s boy, who was so ignominiously upset by the tone of the drinking-glass, laughed at the thunderstorm; and we know that the little Walter Scott was once found during a thunderstorm lying on his back in the open air clapping his hands and shouting “Bonnie, bonnie!” at the flashes of lightning. It is possible that in such cases the exhilarating effect of the brightness counteracts the uncanny effect of the thunder. More observations are needed on this point.

A complete explanation of these early vague alarms of the ear may as yet not be possible. Children show in the matter of sound capricious repugnances which it is exceedingly difficult to account for. They seem sometimes to have their pet aversions like older folk. Yet I think that a general explanation is possible.

To begin with, then, it is probable that in many of these cases, especially those occurring in the first six months, we have to do with an organic phenomenon, with a sort of jar to the nervous system. To understand this we have to remember that the ear, in the case of man at least, is the sense-organ through which the nervous system is most powerfully and profoundly acted on. Sounds seem to go through us, to pierce us, to shake us, to pound and crush us. A child of four or six months has a nervous organisation still weak and unstable, and we should naturally expect loud sounds to produce a disturbing effect on it.

To this it is to be added that sounds have a way of taking us by surprise, of seeming to start out of nothing; and this aspect of them, as I have pointed out above, may well excite vague alarm in the small creatures to whom all that is new and unlooked for is apt to seem uncanny. The fact that most children soon lose their fear by getting used to the sounds seems to show how much the new and the mysterious has to do with the effect.

Whether heredity plays any part here, e.g., in the fear of the dog’s barking and other sounds of animals, seems to me exceedingly doubtful. This point will, however, come up for closer consideration presently, when we deal with children’s fear of animals.

Before considering the manifold outgoings of fear produced by impressions of the eye, we may glance at another form of early disturbance which has some analogy to the shock-like effects of certain sounds. I refer here to the feeling of bodily insecurity which appears very early when the child is awkwardly carried, or let down back-foremost, and later when he begins to walk. One child in her fifth month was observed when carried to hold on to the nurse’s dress as if for safety. And it has been noticed by more than one observer that on dandling a baby up and down in one’s arms, it will on descending, that is when the support of the arms is being withdrawn, show signs of discontent in struggling movements.^[135] Bell, Preyer, and others regard this as an instinctive form of fear. Such manifestations may, however, be merely the result of sudden and rude disturbances of the sense of bodily ease which attends the habitual condition of adequate support. A child accustomed to lie in a cradle, on the floor, or on somebody’s lap, might be expected to be put out when the supporting mass is greatly reduced, as in bad carrying, or wholly removed, as in quickly lowering him backwards. The fear of falling, which shows itself during the first attempts to stand, comes, it must be remembered, as an accompaniment of a new and highly strange situation. The first experience of using the legs for support must, one supposes, involve a profound change in the child’s whole bodily consciousness, a change which may well be accompanied with a sense of disturbance. Not only so, it comes after a considerable experience of partial fallings, as in trying to turn over when lying, half climbing the sides of the cradle, etc., and still harder bumpings when the crawling stage is reached. These would, I suspect, be quite sufficient to produce the timidity which is observable on making the bolder venture of standing.^[136]

Fear of Visible Things.

Fears excited by visual impressions come later than those excited by sounds. The reason of this seems pretty obvious. Visual sensations do not produce the strong effect of nervous shock which auditory ones produce. Let a person compare the violent and profound jar which he experiences on suddenly hearing a loud sound, with the slight surface-agitation produced by the sudden movement of an object across the field of vision. The latter has less of the effect of nervous jar and more of the characteristics of fear proper, that is, apprehension of evil. We should accordingly expect that eye-fears would only begin to show themselves in the child after experience had begun its educative work.^[137]

At the outset it is well, as in the case of the ear-fears, to keep before us the distinction between a mere dislike to a sensation and a true reaction of fear. We shall find that children’s quasi-Æsthetic dislikes to certain colours may readily simulate the appearance of fears.

Among the earliest manifestations of fear excited by visual impressions we have those called forth by the presentation of something new and strange, especially when it involves a rupture of customary arrangements. Although children love and delight in what is new, their disposition to fear is apt to give to new and strange objects a disquieting, if not distinctly alarming character. This apprehension shows itself as soon as a child has begun to be used or accustomed to a particular state of things.

Among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the customary, we have that of change of place. At first the infant betrays no sign of disturbance on being carried into a new room. But when once it has grown accustomed to a certain room it will feel a new one to be strange, and eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. This sense of strangeness in place sometimes appears very early. The little girl M., on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, “looked all round and then burst out crying”. This feeling of uneasiness may linger late. A boy retained up to the age of three years eight months the fear of being left alone in strange hotels or lodgings. Yet entrance on a new abode does not by any means always excite this reaction. A child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things. Thus one boy on being taken at the age of fifteen months to a fresh house and given a small plain room looked round and laughed at the odd carpet. Children even of the same age appear in such circumstances to vary greatly with respect to the relative strength of the impulses of fear and curiosity.

How different children’s mental attitude may be towards the new and unfamiliar is illustrated by some notes on a boy sent me by his mother. This child, “though hardly ever afraid of strange people or places, was very much frightened as a baby of familiar things seen after an interval”. Thus “at ten months he was excessively frightened on returning to his nursery after a month’s absence. On this occasion he screamed violently if his nurse left his side for a moment for some hours after he got home, whereas he had not in the least objected to being installed in a strange nursery.” The mother adds that “at thirteen months, his memory having grown stronger, he was very much pleased at coming to his home after being away a fortnight”. This case looks puzzling enough at first, and seems to contradict the laws of infant psychology. Perhaps the child’s partial recognition was accompanied by a sense of the uncanny, like that which we experience when a place seems familiar to us though we have no clear recollection of having seen it before.

What applies to places applies also to persons: a sudden change of customary human surroundings by the arrival of a stranger on the scene is apt to trouble the child.

At first all faces seem alike for the child. Later on unfamiliar faces excite something like a grave inquisitorial scrutiny. Yet, for the first three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers. It is only later, when attachment to human belongings has been developed, that the approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and the shrinking away of fear. Preyer gives the sixth and seventh months as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face. In one set of notes sent me it was remarked that a child of four and a half months would cry on being nursed by a stranger. To be nursed by a stranger, however, is to have the whole baby-world revolutionised; little wonder then that it should bring the feeling of strangeness and homelessness.

Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children being decidedly more sociable towards strangers than others. It would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take kindly to them. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition occurs at very different dates in the case of different children.^[138]

It is worth noting that the little boy to whom I referred just now displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends, after an interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old, “he moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came home after a fortnight’s holiday”. Here, however, the signs of fear seem to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan.

Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure of this same mental uneasiness. Preyer’s boy when one year and five months old was much disturbed at seeing his mother in a black dress. Children seem to have a special dislike to black apparel. George Sand describes her fear at having to put on black stockings when her father died. Yet any change of colour in dress will disturb a child. C., when an infant, was distressed to tears at the spectacle of a new colour and pattern on his mother’s dress. This dislike to any change of dress as such is borne out by other observations. A child manifested between the age of about seven months and of two and a half years the most marked repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new apparel disturbed too rudely the child’s sense of his proper self.

In certain cases the introduction of new natural objects of great extent and impressiveness will produce a similar effect of childish anxiety, as though they made too violent a change in the surroundings. One of the best illustrations of this obtainable from the life of an average well-to-do child is the impression produced by a first visit to the sea. Preyer’s boy at the age of twenty-one months showed all the signs of fear when his nurse carried him on her arm close to the sea.^[139] The boy C. on being first taken near the sea at the age of two was disturbed by its noise. While, however, I have a number of well-authenticated cases of such an instinctive repugnance to, and something like dread of the sea, I find that there is by no means uniformity in children’s behaviour in this particular. A little boy who first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months exhibited signs not of fear but of wondering delight, prettily stretching out his tiny hands towards it as if wanting to go to it. Another child who also first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months began to crawl towards the waves. And yet another boy at the age of twenty-one months on first seeing the sea spread his arms as if to embrace it.

These observations show that the strange big thing affects children very differently. C. had a particular dislike to noises, which was, I think, early strengthened by finding out that his father had the same prejudice. Hence perhaps his hostile attitude towards the sea.

Probably, too, imaginative children, whose minds take in something of the bigness of the sea, will be more disposed to this variety of fear. A mother writes me that her elder child, an imaginative girl, has not even now at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas her sister, one and a quarter years younger, and not of an imaginative temperament, is perfectly fearless. She adds that it is the bigness of the sea which evidently impresses the imagination of the elder.

Imaginative children, too, are apt to give life and purpose to the big moving noisy thing. This is illustrated in M. Pierre Loti’s graphic account of his first childish impressions of the sea, seen one evening in the twilight. “It was of a dark, almost black green: it seemed restless, treacherous, ready to swallow: it was stirring and swaying everywhere at the same time, with the look of sinister wickedness.”^[140]

There seems enough in the vast waste of unresting waters to excite the imagination of a child to awe and terror. Hence it is needless to follow M. Loti in his speculations as to an inherited fear of the sea. He seems to base this supposition on the fact that at this first view he distinctly recognised the sea. But such recognition may have meant merely the objective realisation of what had no doubt been before pretty fully described by his mother and aunt, and imaginatively pictured by himself.

The opposite attitude, that of the thoroughly unimaginative child, in presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of a little girl aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed, “Oh, mamma, look at the soapy water”. The awful mystery of all the stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to this child, being hidden behind the familiar detail of the ‘soapy’ edge.

There is probably nothing in the natural world which makes on the childish imagination quite so awful an impression as the watery Leviathan. Perhaps the fear which one of my correspondents tells me was excited in her when a child by the sudden appearance of a mountain may be akin to this dread of the sea.

We may now pass to another group of fear-excitants, the appearance of certain strange forms and movements of objects.

The close connexion between Æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the well-marked recoilings of children from odd uncanny-looking dolls. The girl M., when just over six months old, was frightened at a Japanese doll so that it had to be put in another room. Another child when thirteen months old was terrified at the sight of an ugly doll. The said doll is described as black with woolly head, startled eyes, and red lips. Such an ogre might well call up a tremor in the bravest of children. In another case, that of a little boy of two years and two months, the broken face of a doll proved to be highly disconcerting. The mother describes the effect as mixed of fear, distress, and intellectual wonder. Nor did his anxiety depart when some hours later the doll, after sleeping in his mother’s room, reappeared with a new face.

In such cases, it seems plain, it is the ugly transformation of something specially familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of nervous apprehension. Making grimaces, that is the spoiling of the typical familiar face, may, it is said, disturb a child even at the early age of two months.^[141] It is much the same when the child M., at the age of thirteen months three weeks, was frightened and howled when a lady looked at her close with blue spectacles, though she was quite used to ordinary glasses. Such transformations of the homely and assuring face are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering to the child, and where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear. Whether “inherited associations” involving a dim recognition of the meaning of these distortions play any part here I do not feel at all certain.

Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what seems to us a quite harmless object. A shying horse is a puzzle to his rider: his terrors are so unpredictable. Similarly in the case of a timid child almost anything unfamiliar and out of the way, whether in the colour, the form, or the movement of an object, may provoke a measure of anxiety. Thus a little girl, aged one year and ten months, showed signs of fear during a drive at a row of grey ash trees placed along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might shy at.

As with animals, so with children, any seemingly uncaused movement is apt to excite a feeling of alarm. Just as a dog will run away from a leaf whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be terrified by the strange and quite irregular behaviour of a feather as it glides along the floor or lifts itself into the air. A little girl of three, standing by the bedside of her mother (who was ill at the time), was so frightened at the sight of a feather, which she accidentally pulled out of the eiderdown quilt, floating in the air that she would not approach the bed for days afterwards.^[142]

In these cases we may suppose that we have to do with a germ of superstitious fear, which seems commonly to have its starting point in the appearance of something exceptional and uncanny, that is to say, unintelligible, and so smacking of the supernatural. The fear of feathers as uncanny objects plays, I am told, a considerable part in the superstitions of folk-lore. Such apparently self-caused movements, so suggestive of life, might easily give rise to a vague sense of a mysterious presence or power possessing the object, and so lead to a crude form of a belief in supernatural agents.

In other cases of unexpected and mysterious movement the fear is slightly different. A little boy when one year and eleven months old was frightened when in a lady’s house by a toy elephant which shook its head. The same child, writes his mother, “at one year seven months was very much scared by a toy cow which mooed realistically when its head was moved. This cow was subsequently given to him, at about two years and three months. He was then still afraid of it, but became reconciled soon after, first allowing others to make it moo if he was at a safe distance, and at last making it moo himself.”

There may have been a germ of the fear of animals here: but I suspect that it was mainly a feeling of uneasiness at the signs of life (movement and sound) appearing when they are not expected, and have an uncanny aspect. The close simulation of a living thing by what is known to be not alive is disturbing to the child as to the adult. He will make his toys alive by his own fancy, yet resent their taking on the full semblance of reality. In this sense he is a born idealist and not a realist. More careful observations on this curious group of child-fears are to be desired.

The fear of shadows is closely related to that of moving toys. They are semblances, though horribly distorted semblances, and they are apt to move with an awful rapidity. The unearthly mounting shadows which accompany the child as he climbs the staircase at night have been instanced by writers as one of childhood’s freezing horrors. Mr. Stevenson writes:—

I have noticed a young cat—the same that showed such terror at the playing of the piano—watch its own shadow rising on the wall, and, as I thought, with a look of apprehension.

The Fear of Animals.

I have purposely reserved for special discussion two varieties of children’s fear, namely, dread of animals and of the dark. As the former certainly manifests itself before the latter I will take it first.

It seems odd that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are at first put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. We must, however, be careful here in distinguishing between mere nerve-shock and dislike on the one hand and genuine fear on the other. Thus a lady whom I know, a good observer, tells me that her boy, though when he was fifteen months old his nerves were shaken by the loud barking of a dog, had no real fear of dogs. With this may be contrasted another case, also sent by a good observer, in which it is specially noted that the aversion to the sound of a dog’s barking developed late and was a true fear.

Æsthetic dislikes, again, may easily give rise to quasi-fears, though, as we all know, little children have not the horrors of their elders in this respect. The boy C. could not understand his mother’s scare at the descending caterpillar. A kind of Æsthetic dislike appears to show itself sometimes towards animals of peculiar shape and colour. A black animal, as a sheep or a cow, seems more particularly to come in for these childish aversions.

At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth week should shrink from a cat.^[143] This is not, so far as I can gather, a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the mother on the precise way in which the child had its first introduction to the domestic pet. So far as one can speculate on the matter, one would say that such early shrinking from animals is probably due to their sudden unexpected movements, which may well disconcert the inexperienced infant accustomed to comparatively restful surroundings.

This seems borne out by another instance, also quoted by Preyer, of a girl who in the fourth month, as also in the eleventh, was so afraid of pigeons that she could not bring herself to stroke them. The prettiness of the pigeon, if not of the cat, ought, one supposes, to ensure the liking of children; and one has to fall back on the supposition of the first disconcerting strangeness of the moving animal world for the child’s mind.

Later shrinkings from animals show more of the nature of fear. It is sometimes said that children inherit from their ancestors the fear of certain animals. Thus Darwin, observing that his boy when taken to the Zoological Gardens at the age of two years and three months showed fear of the big caged animals whose form was unfamiliar to him (lions, tigers, etc.), infers that this fear is transmitted from savage ancestors whose conditions of life compelled them to shun these deadly creatures. But as M. CompayrÉ has well shown^[144] we do not need this hypothesis here. The unfamiliarity of the form of the animal, its bigness, together with the awful suggestions of the cage, would be quite enough to beget a vague sense of danger.

So far as I can ascertain facts are strongly opposed to the theory of an inherited fear of animals. Just as in the first months a child will manifest something like recoil from a pretty and perfectly innocent pigeon, so later on children manifest fear in the most unlikely directions. In The Invisible Playmate, we are told of a girl who got her first fright on seeing a sparrow drop on the grass near her, though she was not the least afraid of big things, and on first hearing the dog bark in his kennel said with a little laugh of surprise, ‘Oh! coughing’.^[145] A parallel case is sent me by a lady friend. One day when her daughter was about four years old she found her standing, the eyes wide open and filled with tears, the arms outstretched for help, evidently transfixed with terror, while a small wood-louse made its slow way towards her. The next day the child was taken for the first time to the “Zoo,” and the mother anticipating trouble held the child’s hand. But there was no need. A ‘fearless spirit’ in general, she released her hand at the first sight of the elephant, and galloped after the monster. If inheritance played a principal part in the child’s fear of animals one would have expected the facts to be reversed: the elephant should have excited dread, not the harmless insect.

So far as my own observations have gone there seems to be but little uniformity among children’s fears of the animal world. What frightens one child may delight another at about the same age. Perhaps there is a tendency to a special dread of certain animals, more particularly the wolf, which as folk-lore tells us reflects the attitude of superstitious adults. Yet it is probable that, as the case of the boy C. suggests, the dread of the wolf grows out of that of the dog, the most alarming of the domestic animals, while it is vigorously sustained by fairy-story.

For the rest children’s shrinking from animals has much of the caprice of grown-up people’s. Not that there is anything really inexplicable in these odd directions of childish fear, any more than in the unpredictable shyings of the horse.horse. If we knew the whole of the horse’s history, and could keep a perfect register of the fluctuations of ‘tone’ in his nervous system, we should understand all his shyings. So with the child. All the vagaries of his dislike to animals would be cleared up if we could look into the secret workings of his mind and measure the varying heights of his courage.

That some of this early disquietude at the sight of strange animals is due to the workings of the mind is seen in the behaviour of Preyer’s boy when at the age of twenty-seven months he was taken to see some little pigs. The boy at the first sight looked earnest, and as soon as the lively little creatures began to suckle the mother he broke out into a fit of crying and turned away from the sight with all the signs of fear. It appeared afterwards that what terrified the child was the idea that the pigs were biting their mother; and this gave rise in the fourth and fifth years to recurrent nocturnal fears of the biting piglets, something like C.’s nocturnal fear of the wolf.^[146] To an imaginative child strongly predisposed to fear, anything suggestive of harm will suffice to beget a measure of trepidation. A child does not want direct experience of the power of a big animal in order to feel a vague uneasiness when near it. His own early inductions respecting the correlation of bigness with strength, aided as this commonly is by information picked up from others, will amply suffice. In the case of the dog, the rough shaggy coat, the teeth which he is told can bite, the swift movements, and worse than all the appalling bark, are quite enough to disconcert a timid child. Even the sudden pouncing down of a sparrow may prove upsetting to a fearful mite as suggesting attack; and a girl of four may be quite capable of imagining the unpleasantness of an invasion of her dainty person by a small creeping wood-louse—which though running slowly was running towards herself—and so of getting a fit of shudders.

It is, I think, undeniable that imaginative children, especially when sickly and disposed to alarm, are subject to a real terror at the thought of the animal world. Its very vastness, the large variety of its uncanny and savage-looking forms—appearing oftentimes as ugly distortions of the human face and figure—this of itself, as known from picture-books, may well generate many a vague alarm. We know from folk-lore how the dangers of the animal world have touched the imagination of simple peoples, and we need not be surprised that it should make the heart of the wee weakly child to quake. Yet the child’s shrinking from animals is less strong than the impulse of companionship which bears him towards them. Tiny children quite as often show the impulse to run after ducks and other animals as to be alarmed at them. Nothing perhaps is prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one of these defenceless youngsters as he is getting over his trepidation at the approach of a strange big dog and ‘making friends’ with the shaggy monster. The perfect love which lies at the bottom of children’s hearts towards their animal kinsfolk soon casts out fear. And when once the reconciliation has been effected it will take a good deal of harsh experience to make the child ever again entertain the thought of danger.

Fear of the Dark.

Fear of the dark, that is, fear excited by the actual experience or the idea of being in the dark, and especially alone in the dark, and the allied dread of dark places as closets and caves, is no doubt very common among children, and seems indeed to be one of their recognised characteristics. Yet it is by no means certain that it is ‘natural’ in the sense of developing itself in all children.

It is certain that children have no such fear at the beginning of life. A baby of three or four months if accustomed to a light may very likely be disturbed at being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of the dark.^[147]

Fear of the dark seems to arise when intelligence has reached a certain stage of development. It apparently assumes a variety of forms. In some children it is a vague uneasiness, in others it takes the shape of a more definite dread. A common variety of this dread is connected with the imaginative filling of the dark with the forms of alarming animals, so that the fear of animals and of the dark are closely connected. Thus, in one case reported to me, a boy between the ages of two and six used at night to see ‘the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room’. The boy C. saw his bÊte noire the wolf in dark places. Mr. Stevens in his note on his boy’s idea of the supernatural remarks that at the age of one year and ten months, when he began to be haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky,’ he was temporarily seized with a fear of the dark.^[148] It is important to add that even children who have been habituated to going to bed in the dark in the first months are liable to acquire the fear.

This mode of fear is, however, not universal among children. One lady, for whose accuracy I can vouch, assures me that her boy, who is now four years old, has never manifested the feeling. A similar statement is made by a careful observer, Dr. Sikorski, with reference to his own children.^[149] It seems possible to go through childhood without making acquaintance with this terror, and to acquire it in later life. I know a lady who only acquired the fear towards the age of thirty. “Curiously enough (she writes) I was never afraid of the dark as a child; but during the last two years I hate to be left alone in the dark, and if I have to enter a dark room, like my study, beyond the reach of the maids from downstairs, I notice a remarkable acceleration in my heart-beat and hurry to strike a light or rush downstairs as quickly as possible.”

We can faintly conjecture from what Charles Lamb and others have told us about the spectres that haunted their nights what a weighty crushing horror this fear of the dark may become. Hence we need not be surprised that the writer of fiction has sought to give it a vivid and adequate description. Victor Hugo, for example, when in Les MisÉrables he is painting the feelings of little Cosette, who has been sent out alone at night to fetch water from a spring in a wood, says she “felt herself seized by the black enormity of Nature. It was not only terror which possessed her, it was something more terrible even than terror.”

Different explanations have been offered of this fear. Locke, who when writing on educational matters was rather hard on nurses and servants, puts down the whole of these fears to those wicked persons, “whose usual method is to awe children and keep them in subjection by telling them of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, and such other names as carry with them the idea of something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be afraid of when alone, especially in the dark”.^[150] Rousseau on the other hand urges that there is a natural cause. “Accustomed as I am to perceive objects from a distance, and to anticipate their impressions in advance, how is it possible for me, when I no longer see anything of the objects that surround me, not to imagine a thousand creatures, a thousand movements, which may hurt me, and against which I am unable to protect myself?”^[151]

Rousseau here supplements and corrects Locke. For one thing I have ascertained in the case of my own child, and in that of others, that a fear of the dark has grown up when the influence of the wicked nurse has been carefully eliminated. Locke forgets that children can get terrifying fancies from other children, and from all sorts of suggestions, unwittingly conveyed by the words of respectable grown people. Besides, he leaves untouched the question, why children when left alone in the dark should choose to dwell on these fearful images, rather than on the bright pretty ones which they also acquire. R. L. Stevenson has told us how happy a child can make himself at night with such pleasing fancies. Yet it must be owned that darkness seems rather to favour images of what is weird and terrible. How is this? Rousseau gets some way towards answering the question by saying (as I understand him to say) that darkness breeds a sense of insecurity. I do not, however, think that it is the inconvenience of being in the dark which generates the fear: a child might, I imagine, acquire it without ever having had to explore a dark place.

I strongly suspect that the fear of darkness takes its rise in a sensuous phenomenon, a kind of physical repugnance. All sensations of very low intensity, as very soft vocal sounds, have about them a tinge of melancholy, a tristesse, and this is especially noticeable in the sensations which the eye experiences when confronted with a dark space, or, what is tantamount to this, a black and dull surface. The symbolism of darkness and blackness, as when we talk of ‘gloomy’ thoughts or liken trouble to a ‘black cloud,’ seems to rest on this effect of melancholy.

Along with this gloomy character of the sensation of dark, and not always easy to distinguish from it, there goes the craving of the eye for its customary light, and the interest and the gladness which come with seeing. When the eye and brain are not fatigued, that is when we are wakeful, this eye-ache may become an appreciable pain; and it is probable that children feel the deprivation more acutely than grown persons, owing to the abundance of their visual activity as well as to the comparatively scanty store of their thought-resources. Add to this that darkness, by extinguishing the world of visible things, would give to a timid child tenacious of the familiar home-surroundings a peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banishment from all that he knows and loves. The reminiscences of this feeling described in later life show that it is the sense of solitude which oppresses the child in his dark room.^[152]

This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation of confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a wakeful child even when he is in bed and there is no restriction of bodily activity. But even this would not amount to a full passionate dread of darkness. It seems to me to be highly probable that a baby of two or three months might feel this vague depression and even this craving for the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a light; yet such a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indications of fear.fear.

Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child’s imagination, and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion from nurse or other children of the notion that there are bogies in the room. Darkness is precisely the situation most favourable to vivid imagination: the screening of the visible world makes the inner world of fancy vivid and distinct by contrast. Are we not all apt to shut our eyes when we try to ‘visualise’ or picture things very distinctly? This fact of a preternatural activity of imagination, taken with the circumstance emphasised by Rousseau that in the darkness the child is no longer distinctly aware of the objects that are actually before him, would help us to understand why children are so much given to projecting into the unseen black spaces the creatures of their imagination. Not only so—and this Rousseau does not appear to have recognised—the dull feeling of depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might suffice to give a gloomy and weird cast to the images so projected.

But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element in this childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive sensation: we see it, and the sensation, apart from any difference of signification which we afterwards learn to give to it, is of the same kind that is obtained by looking at a dull black surface. To the child the difference between a black object and a dark unillumined space is as yet not clear, and I believe it will be found that children tend to materialise or to ‘reify’ darkness. When, for example, a correspondent tells me that darkness was envisaged by her when a child as “a crushing power,” I think I see traces of this childish feeling. I seem able to recall my own childish sense of a big black something on suddenly waking and opening the eyes in a very dark room.

But there is still another thing to be noticed in this sensation of darkness. The black field is not uniform; some parts of it show less black than others, and the indistinct and rude pattern of comparatively light and dark changes from moment to moment; while now and again more definite spots of brightness may focus themselves. The varying activity of the retina would seem to account for this apparent changing of the black scene. What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do with a child’s fear of the dark? If he will recall what was said about the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal forms in the lines of a cracked ceiling, or the veining of a piece of marble, he will, I think, recognise the drift of my remarks. These slight and momentary differences in the blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images; the child with a strongly excited fancy sees in these dim traces of the black formless waste definite forms. These will naturally be the forms with which he is most familiar, and since his fancy is at the moment tinged with melancholy they will be gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence we may expect to hear of children seeing the forms of terrifying living things in the dark.

Here is a particularly instructive case. A boy of four years had for some time been afraid of the dark and indulged by having the candle left burning at night. On hearing that the Crystal Palace had been burned down he asked for the first time to have the light taken away, fear of the dark being now cast out by the bigger fear of fire. Some time after this he volunteered an account of his obsolete terrors to his father. “Do you know,” he said, “what I thought dark was? A great large live thing the colour of black with a mouth and eyes.” Here we have the ‘reifying’ of darkness, and we probably see the influence of the comparatively bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an influence still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a child saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. CompayrÉ, in which a child on being asked why he did not like to be in a dark place answered: “I don’t like chimney-sweeps”.^[153] Here the blackness with its dim suggestions of brighter spots determined the image of the black chimney-sweep with his white flashes of mouth and eyes.^[154] I should like to observe here parenthetically that we still need to learn from children themselves, by talking to them and inviting their confidence when the fear of the dark is first noticed, how they are apt to envisage it.

When imagination becomes abnormally active, and the child is haunted by alarming images, these by recurring with greatest force in the stillness and darkness of the night will add to the terrifying associations of darkness. This is illustrated in the case of the boy Stevens, who was haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky’ at night. Dreams, especially of the horrible nightmare kind to which nervous children are subject, may invest the dark with a new terror. A child suddenly waking up and with open eyes seeing the phantom-object of his dream against the black background may be forgiven for acquiring a dread of dark rooms. Possibly this experience gives the clue to the observation already quoted of a boy who did not want to sleep in a particular room because there were so many dreams in it.

If the above explanation of the child’s fear of the dark is a sound one Rousseau’s prescription for curing it is not enough. Children may be encouraged to explore dark rooms, and by touching blind-like their various objects rendered familiar with the fact that things remain unchanged even when enveloped in darkness, that the dark is nothing but our temporary inability to see things; and this may no doubt be helpful in checking the fear when calm reflexion becomes possible. But a radical cure must go farther, must aim at checking the activity of morbid imagination—and here what Locke says about the effects of the terrifying stories of nurses is very much to the point—and in extreme cases must set about strengthening shaky nerves. Mothers would do well to remember that even religious instruction when injudiciously presented may add to the terrors of the dark for these wee tremulous organisms. One observation sent me strongly suggests that a child may take a strong dislike to being shut up in the dark with the terrible all-seeing God.

Fears and their Palliatives.

I have probably illustrated the first fears of children at sufficient length. Without trying to exhaust the subject I have, I think, shown that fear of a well-marked and intense kind is a common feature of the first years of life, and that it assumes a Protean variety of shapes.

Much more will no doubt have to be done in the way of methodical observation, and more particularly statistical inquiry into the comparative frequency of the several fears, the age at which they commonly appear, and so forth, before we can build up a theory of the subject. One or two general observations may, however, be hazarded even at this stage.

The thing which strikes one most perhaps in these early fears is how little they have to do with any remembered experience of evil. The child is inexperienced, and if humanely treated knows little of the acuter forms of human suffering. It would seem at least as if he feared not because experience had made him apprehensive of evil, but because he was constitutionally and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling of insecurity. This feeling of weakness and insecurity comes to the surface in presence of what is unknown in so far as this can be brought by the child’s mind into a relation to his welfare—as disturbing noises, and the movements of things, especially when they take on the form of approaches. The same thing is, as we have seen, illustrated in the fear of the dark. A like explanation seems to offer itself for other common forms of fear, especially those excited by others’ threats, as the dread of the policeman, and little George Sand’s horror at the idea of being shut up all night in the ‘crystal prison’ of a lamp. The fact that children’s fears are not the direct product of experience is expressed otherwise by saying that they are the offspring of the imagination. A child is apt to be afraid because he fancies things, and it will probably be demonstrated by statistical evidence that the most imaginative children (other things being equal) are the most subject to fear.

In certain of these characteristics, at least, children’s fears resemble those of animals. In both alike fear is much more an instinctive recoil from the unknown than an apprehension of known evil. The shying of a horse, the apparent fear of dogs at certain noises, probably too the fear of animals at the sight and sound of fire—so graphically described by Mr. Kipling in the case of the jungle beasts—illustrate this. Animals too seem to have a sense of the uncanny, when something apparently uncaused happens, as when Romanes excited fear in a dog by attaching a fine thread to a bone, and by surreptitiously drawing it from the animal, giving to the bone the look of self-movement. The same dog was frightened by soap-bubbles. According to Romanes, dogs are frightened by portraits. It is to be added, however, that in certain of animal fears the influence of heredity is clearly recognisable, whereas in children’s fears I have regarded it as doubtful. The fact that a child is not frightened at fire, which terrifies many animals, seems to illustrate this difference.^[155]

Another instructive comparison is that of children’s fears with those of savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity, and fall instinctively in presence of a big unknown into the attitude of dread. In the region of superstitious fear more particularly, we see how in both a gloomy fancy forestalls knowledge, investing the new and unexplored with alarming traits.

Lastly, children’s fears have some resemblance to certain abnormal mental conditions. Idiots, who are so near normal childhood in their degree of intelligence, show a marked fear of strangers. More interesting, however, in the present connexion, is the exaggeration of the childish fear of new objects which shows itself in certain mental aberrations. There is a characteristic dread of newness, neophobia, just as there is a dread of water.^[156]

While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’s fears they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the instinctive fear-impulse from the very beginning. How much it does in the first months of life it is difficult to say. In the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass, or its cold bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. Careful observations seem to me to be required on the point, at what definite date signs of fear arising from experience of pain begin to show themselves in the child. Some children, at least, have a surprising way of not minding even considerable amounts of physical pain: the misery of a fall, a blow, a cut, and so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful, indeed, whether the venerable saw, ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ is invariably true. It appears, in many cases at least, to take a good amount of real agony to produce a genuine fear in a young child.^[157] This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, to the tutor of small boys. It may well be that a definite and precise recalling of the misery of a scratch, or even of a moderate burn, may not conduce to the development of a true fear, and that here, too, fear when it arises in all its characteristic masterfulness is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known fact that a child will be more terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if there be a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older fears? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth-extraction if it were experienced very often, and we had a sufficiently photographic imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and duration of the pain?

Much the same thing shows itself in the cases where fear can be clearly traced to experience and association. In some of these it is no doubt remembered experience of suffering which causes the fear. A child that has been seriously burned will unquestionably be frightened at a too close approach of a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this excitation of fear by association it is the primary experience of fear itself which seems to be the real object of the apprehension. Thus a child who has been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, of a picture of a dog, and so forth. The little boy referred to above who was afraid of the toy elephant that shook its head showed signs of fear a fortnight afterwards on coming across a picture of an elephant in a picture-book. In such ways does fear propagate fear in the timid little breast.

One cannot part from the theme of children’s fears without a reference to a closely connected subject, the problem of their happiness. To ask whether childhood is a happy time, still more to ask whether it is the happiest, is to raise perhaps a foolish and insoluble question. Later reminiscences would seem in this case to be particularly untrustworthy. Children themselves no doubt may have very definite views on the subject. A child will tell you with the unmistakable marks of profound conviction that he is so unhappy. But paradoxical as it may seem, children really know very little about the matter. At the best they can only tell you how they feel at particular moments. To seek for a precise and satisfactory solution of the problem is thus futile. Only rough comparisons of childhood and later life are possible.

In any such comparison the fears of early years claim, no doubt, careful consideration. There seem to be people who have no idea what the agony of these early terrors amounts to. And since it is the unknown that excites this fear, and the unknown in childhood is almost everything, the possibilities of suffering from this source are great enough.

George Sand hardly exaggerates when she writes: “Fear is, I believe, the greatest moral suffering of children”. In the case of weakly, nervous and imaginative children, more especially, this susceptibility to terror may bring miserable days and yet more miserable nights.

Nevertheless, it is easy here to pass from one extreme of brutal indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. Childish suffering is terrible while it lasts, but happily it has a way of not lasting. The cruel distorting fit of terror passes and leaves the little face with its old sunny out-look. It is to be remembered, too, that while children are pitiably fearful in their own way, they are, as we have seen in the case of the little Walter Scott, delightfully fearless also, as judged by our standards. How oddly fear and fearlessness go together is illustrated in a story sent me. A little boy fell into a brook. On his being fished out by his mother, his sister, aged four, asked him: ‘Did you see any crocodiles?’ ‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘I wasn’t in long enough.’ The absence of fear of the water itself was as characteristic as the presence of fear of the crocodile.

It is refreshing to find that in certain cases at least where older people have done their worst to excite terror, a child has escaped its suffering. Professor Barnes tells us that a Californian child’s belief in the supernatural takes on a happy tone, directing itself to images of heaven with trees, birds, and other pretty things, and giving but little heed to the horrors of hell.^[158] In less sunny climes than California children may not, perhaps, be such little optimists, and it is probable that graphic descriptions of hell-fire have sent many a creepy thrill of horror along a child’s tender nerves. Still it may be said that, owing to the fortunate circumstance of children having much less fear of fire than many animals, the misery in which eternal punishment is wont to be bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on a child’s imagination. The author of The Uninitiated illustrates a real child-trait when she makes her small heroine conceive of hell as a place that smelt nastily (from its brimstone).brimstone).^[159] Then it is noticeable that children in general are but little affected by fear at the sight or the thought of death. The child C. had a passing dread of being buried, but his young hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off calamity. Other children, I find, dislike the idea of death as threatening to deprive them of their mother. Perhaps they can more readily suppose that somebody else will die than that they themselves will do so. This comparative immunity from the dread of death is no small deduction to be made from the burden of children’s fear.

Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has provided the small timorous person with other instincts which tend to mitigate and even to neutralise it. It is a happy circumstance that the most prolific excitant of fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also provocative of another feeling, that of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. Even animals are sometimes divided in the presence of something strange between fear and curiosity,^[160] and children’s curiosity is much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking his head against something as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to dive into the bush again.^[161] Still more interesting here are the gradual transitions from actual fear before the new and strange to bold inspection. The child who was frightened by her Japanese doll insisted on seeing it every day. The behaviour of one of these small persons on the arrival at the house of a strange dog, of a dark foreigner, or some other startling novelty, is a pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering timidity, the shrinking back to the mother’s breast, followed by curious peeps, then by bolder outstretchings of head and arms, mark the stages by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and finally leave it far behind. Very soon we know the small timorous creatures will grow into bold adventurers. They will make playthings of the alarming animals, and of the alarming shadows too.^[162] Later on still perhaps they will love nothing so much as to probe the awful mysteries of gunpowder.

One palliative of these early terrors remains to be touched on, the instinct of sheltering or refuge-taking. The first manifestations of what is called the social nature of children are little more than the reverse side of their timidity. A baby will cease crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of mother or nurse because a vague sense of human companionship does away with the misery of the black solitude. A frightened child probably knows an ecstasy of bliss when folded in the protective embrace of a mother’s arms. Even the most timid children never have the full experience of terror so long as there is within reach the secure base of all their reconnoitring excursions, the mother’s skirts. Happy those little ones who have ever near them loving arms within whose magic circle the oncoming of the cruel fit of terror is instantly checked, giving place to a delicious calm.

How unhappy those children must be who, being fearsome by nature, lack this refuge, who are left much alone to wrestle with their horrors as best they may, and are rudely repulsed when they bear their heart-quakings to others, I would not venture to say. Still less should I care to suggest what is suffered by those unfortunates who find in those about them not comfort, assurance, support in their fearsome moments, but the worst source of their terrors. To be brutal to these small sensitive organisms, to practise on their terrors, to take delight in exciting the wild stare and wilder shriek of terror, this is perhaps one of the strange things which make one believe in the old dogma that the devil can enter into men and women. For here we seem to have to do with a form of cruelty so exquisite, so contrary to the oldest of instincts, that it is dishonouring to the savage and to the lower animals to attempt to refer it to heredity.

To dwell on such things, however, would be to go back to a pessimistic view of childhood. It is undeniable that children are exposed to indescribable misery when they are delivered into the hands of a consummately cruel guardian. Yet one may hope that this sort of person is exceptional, something of which we can give no account save by saying that now and again in sport nature produces a monster, as if to show what she could do if she did not choose more wisely and benignly to work within the limitations of type.