342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



toward her. The next day the child was taken for the first time 

 to the "Zoo," and the mother, anticipating trouble, held her hand. 

 But there was no need. A "fearless spirit "in general, she re- 

 leased her hand at the first sight of the elephant, and galloped 

 after the monster. If inheritance plays a principal part in the 

 child's fear of animals, one would have expected the facts to be 

 reversed. The elephant should have excited dread, not the harm- 

 less insect. 



As this story tells us, children's shrinkings from animals have 

 much of the caprice of grown-up people's. Not that there is any- 

 thing really inexplicable in these odd directions of childish fear, 

 any more than in the unpredictable shyings of the horse. If we 

 knew the whole of the horse's history, and could keep a perfect 

 register of the fluctuations of " tone " in his nervous system, we 

 should understand all his shyings. So with the child. All the 

 vagaries of his dislike to animals would be cleared up if we could 

 look into the secret workings of his mind and measure the vary- 

 ing heights of his courage. 



That some of this early disquietude at the sight of strange 

 animals is due to the workings of the mind is seen in the behavior 

 of Preyer's boy when at the age of twenty-seven months he was 

 taken to see some little pigs. The boy on the first view looked 

 earnest, and as soon as the lively little creatures began to suckle 

 the mother he broke out into a fit of crying and turned away from 

 the sight with all the signs of fear. It appeared afterward that 

 what terrified the child was the idea that the pigs were biting 

 their mother ; and this gave rise in the fourth and fifth year to 

 recurrent nocturnal fears of the bitiug piglets, something like 



C 's nocturnal fear of the wolf.* To an imaginative child 



strongly predisposed to fear, anything suggestive of harm will 

 suffice to beget a measure of trepidation. A child does not want 

 direct experience of the power of a big animal in order to feel a 

 vague uneasiness when near it. His own early inductions respect- 

 ing the correlation of bigness and strength, aided as this com- 

 monly is by information picked up from ethers, will amply suf- 

 fice. To this may be added that the swiftness of movement of 

 the dog, as well as the knowledge soon gained that it can bite, is 

 apt to make this animal especially alarming. So, too, the sudden 

 pouncing down of a sparrow might prove upsetting as suggesting 

 attack; and a girl of four may be quite able to imagine the 

 unpleasantness of an invasion of her dainty person by a small 

 creeping wood louse which, though running slowly, was running 

 toward herself, and so to get a fit of shudders. 



It is, I think, undeniable that imaginative children, especially 



* See Preyer, op. til., p. 130. 



