Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/695

Rh satisfactory manner. Many of the inferences drawn are no doubt mucli more open to question, and they are here put forward chiefly with the purpose of drawing the attention of those much better able to judge of the value and bearing of the facts than the present writer.

It is curious how little has been written on the natural history of the human infant in its normal state. We have, of course, an abundant medical literature on the ailments and care of young children, but the many eminent physicians who have written on the subject have confined their attention almost entirely to abnormal or diseased conditions. Even in studying the healthy physiological processes the primary idea has been to gain the kind of knowledge which would be available in the treatment of disease rather than that which might illustrate the history of the development of the race, and this may easily account for many facts of very considerable value for the latter purpose being overlooked or not appreciated at their proper value.

It is plain that a typically healthy infant, in which Nature's processes go on without the interference of medical art, will, after the first crisis of its entry on an independent existence is over, scarcely come under the notice of the physician at all.

The three classes of persons who are brought into close enough contact with the objects under discussion to study their habits and characteristics are medical men, nurses, and parents. The first have been already dealt with. Of the second class we may say that their knowledge, although doubtless profound, and derived both from tradition and observation, does not seem very available for the purposes of science. This has hitherto been my experience, for although in nearly every case where questions were asked there was every assumption and appearance of superior erudition, yet it seemed almost impossible to tap the supply.

Parents, as a rule, from the very nature of their relationship to their offspring, are obviously unable to look on them with the cold, impartial gaze of the scientific investigator. At any rate, experience has proved that very little has resulted from their observations. The parental bias must, more or less, vitiate results; and the average mother, in spite of many unquestioned merits, is about as competent to take an unprejudiced view of the facts bearing on the natural history of her infant as a West African negro would do to carry out an investigation of the anatomy and physiology of a fetich.

There are some illustrious exceptions, and Darwin himself, in his Expression of the Emotions and Descent of Man, gives an account of some very interesting observations on several of his own children when infants. Several salient traits seem, however, to have completely escaped him, and some of these, which will be