Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/124

112 important part in the event that is recollected, as in the following example: "My father was holding me at the window of the ground floor in which we resided, and, balancing me now to the right and now to the left, he made me play hide and seek with one of his friends, whose hairy, laughing face I still remember. This memory goes back to an age when I could hardly walk, and could not speak—when I was about two years old" A professor's recollection is of a garden planted with flowers and vegetables, inclosed by a hedge with a green wooden gate. "The image of the garden is floating and vague, like the recollection, except that the gate is retained in my memory with a really surprising precision of details. I see it now, with its leather hinges, nailed to a rough post, and slimy with the moisture; and I see hanging to that gate a rude boy, the terror of the children of his age, who clung there with tense legs and clinched hands, all doubled up, with a grinning face and his eyes glowing with mischief through the intervals of the bushy red hair that fell over them—a cynically grotesque figure. A cracking was heard, and all the urchins ran away like a flock of frightened sparrows, this one in the lead shouting shrilly and ironically. All the details of this scene have remained very precise in memory, and yet I can not say that I recollect the mocking cries of this youngster. I do not hear them now. I was then sixteen or eighteen months old; not more than two years at most" We transcribe this example in full because it illustrates the usually indefinite character of auditive recollections. Some persons recall them more distinctly, and some can remember words that were spoken, but not by the sound. A few persons who have analyzed their remembrances subsequent to the earliest—of seven, ten, or fifteen years of age—observe that auditive memory comes later than visual.

We have the same affirmation in a large number of responses of the manner in which the subject himself is represented. He sees himself as a child, but does not feel himself a child. He has a picture in which there is a child, and knows that he is the child. "I see myself in the view as somebody outside of me" "I am at the seashore and my mother is holding me in her arms. The picture appears to me as if I was away from the scene" Many of the answers describe the feature thus.

Other sorts of perceptions rarely make part of the earliest recollection. Only three persons speak of the pain of an operation. Taine cites a fact of this kind. "M. Brierre de Boismont, having had a scalp disease when a child, declares that he still feels the pulling of the hair in the treatment of his skull" One example occurs among the answers we received: "I had the croup when I was twelve months old, and it was necessary to burn all the ulcers in