344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dark places. Mr. Stevens, in his note on his boy's ideas of the su- 

 pernatural, remarks that when one year and ten months old he was 

 temporarily seized with a fear of the dark at the time when he 

 began to be haunted by the specter of " Cocky." * It is important 

 to add that even children who have been habituated to going to 

 bed in the dark in the first months are liable to acquire the fear. 



This mode of fear is, however, not universal among children. 

 One lady, for whose accuracy I can vouch, assures me that her 

 boy, now four years old, has never manifested a dread of darkness. 

 A similar statement is made by a careful observer, Dr. Sikorski, 

 with reference to his own children, f It seems possible to go 

 through childhood without making acquaintance with this terror, 

 and to acquire it in later life. I know a lady who only acquired 

 the fear toward the age of thirty. "Curiously enough/' she 

 writes, " I was never afraid of the dark as a child ; but during the 

 last two years I hate to be left alone in the dark, and if I have to 

 enter a dark room, like my study, beyond the reach of the maids 

 from downstairs, I notice a remarkable acceleration in my heart- 

 beat and hurry to strike a light or rush downstairs as quickly as 

 possible." 



There is little doubt that when the fear is developed it is apt 

 to become one of the greatest miseries of childhood. We can 

 faintly conjecture, from what Charles Lamb and others have told 

 us about the specters that haunted their nights, what a weighty, 

 crushing terror this may become. Hence, we need not be sur- 

 prised that the writer of fiction has sought to give it a vivid and 

 adequate description. Victor Hugo, for example, when painting 

 the feelings of little Cosette, who had been sent out alone at night 

 to fetch water from a spring in the wood, says she " felt herself 

 seized by the black enormity of Nature. It was not only terror 

 which possessed her, it was something more terrible even than 

 terror." 



Different explanations have been offered of this fear. Locke, 

 who, when writing on educational matters, was rather hard on 

 nurses and servants, puts down the whole of these fears to these 

 wicked persons, "whose usual method is to awe children and 

 keep them in subjection by telling them of Raw Head and Bloody 

 Bones, and such other names as carry with them the idea of 

 something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be 

 afraid of when alone, especially in the dark." \ Rousseau, on the 

 other hand, urges that there is a natural cause. " Accustomed 

 as I am to perceive objects from a distance, and to anticipate 

 their impressions in advance, how is it possible for me, when I 



* Mind, xi, p. 149. f Quoted by Compayr6, op. cit., p. 100. 



X Thoughts on Education, 138. 



