Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/18

10 child—in presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of the little girl, aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed, "mamma, look at the soapy water!" The awful mystery of all the stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to the 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 connection between æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the well-marked recoil of a child of thirteen months at the sight of an ugly doll. The said doll is described as a black doll with woolly head, startled eyes, and red lips. Such an ogre of a doll 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 a mixture 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 familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of nervous apprehension. Making grimaces—that is, the spoiling of the typical familiar face—may disturb a child even at the early age of two months. Such transformations are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering, and where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear.

Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what seem to us quite harmless objects. 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 color, 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 during a drive signs of fear at a row of gray ash trees placed along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might be expected to 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