Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/353

Rh of peculiar shape and color. Black animals, as sheep and cows, seem more particularly to come in for these childish antipathies.

At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth week should appear to shrink from cats. This is not, so far as I can gather, a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the mother as to 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 pigeons, if not of cats, ought, one supposes, to insure 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 zoölogical 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, we do not need this hypothesis here. The unfamiliarity of the form, the 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 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 into 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." 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