Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/355

Rh when sickly and disposed to alarm, are subject to great terror at the thoughts 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 a picture book, may well generate many a vague terror. We know from folklore how the dangers of the animal world have touched the imagination of primitive races, 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 it toward them. Nothing is prettier perhaps in child-life than the pose and look of a small boy 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 toward 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 fear.

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

It is generally agreed 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.

Fear of the dark seems to come on 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