352 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



itself to images of heaven, with trees, birds, and other pretty- 

 things, and giving but little heed to the horrors of hell.* In less 

 sunny climes than California children may not perhaps be such 

 little optimists, and it is probable that graphic descriptions of 

 hell fire have sent many a creepy thrill of horror along a child's 

 tender nerves. Still, it may be said that, owing to the fortunate 

 circumstance that children have much less fear of fire than many 

 animals, the imagery in which eternal punishment is wont to be 

 bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on 

 a child's imagination. Then it is noticeable that children in gen- 

 eral are but little affected by fear at the sight or the thought of 



death. The child C had a passing dread of being buried, but 



his young, hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off 

 calamity. This, too, is no small deduction to be made from the 

 burden of children's fear. 



Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has pro- 

 vided the small, timorous person with other instincts which tend 

 to mitigate and even to neutralize it. It is a happy circumstance 

 that the most prolific excitant of fear, the presentation of some- 

 thing new and uncanny, is also provocative of another feeling 

 that of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. Even 

 animals are sometimes divided in the presence of something 

 strange between fear and curiosity ; f and children's curiosity is 

 much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first making 

 acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the 

 head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking its head 

 against something, as if experimenting and watching the effect. 

 A clearer case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child 

 who, after pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, 

 proceeded to dive into the bush again. \ Still more interesting 

 here are the gradual transitions from actual fear before the new 

 and strange to bold inspection. The behavior of one of these 

 small persons on the arrival at his house of a strange dog, of a 

 colored foreigner, Hindu, or some. other startling novelty, is a 

 pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering shyness and 

 shrinking back to the mother's breast, followed by cautious peeps, 

 then by bolder outreachings of head and arms, mark the stages 

 by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and finally leave it 

 far behind. Very soon we know the small, timorous creatures 

 will grow into bold, adventurous lads, loving nothing so much as 

 to probe the awful mysteries of flame and gunpowder and other 

 alarming things. 



* Pedagogic Review, ii, 3, p. 445. 



\ Some examples are given by Preyer, op. cit., p. 135. 



\ Miss Shinn, op. cit., p. 150. 



