DARWINISM IN THE NURSERY. 679 



liide beliind the curtains and pretend to be in great alarm wlien 

 discovered. Probably the readiness with which infants play at 

 " bo-peep," and peer round the edge of a cradle curtain, and then 

 suddenly draw back into hiding, is traceable to a much earlier 

 ancestor. Here we see the remains of a habit common to nearly 

 all arboreal animals, and the cradle curtain, or chair, or what not, 

 is merely a substitute for a part of the trunk of a tree behind 

 which the body is supposed to be hidden, while the eyes, and as 

 little else as possible, are exposed for a moment to scrutinize a 

 possible enemy and then quickly withdrawn. 



It is remarkable how quickly very young children notice and 

 learn to distinguish different domestic animals. I have known 

 several cases in which an infant under a year old, which could not 

 talk at all, has recognized and imitated the cries of sheep, cows, 

 dogs, and cats, and evidently knew a horse from an ox. Not 

 infrequently I have heard great surprise expressed by parents at 

 the quickness with which a baby would perceive some animal a 

 long distance off, or when from other causes it was so inconspicu- 

 ous as to escape the eyes of older persons. Pictures of animals, 

 too, have a great fascination, and the child is never tired of hear- 

 ing its playmate roar like a lion or bray like an ass when looking 

 at them in the picture-book. This may seem of trivial import ; 

 but it is worth while to remember that the baby's forefathers for 

 several thousand generations depended upon their knowledge of 

 the forms and ways of wild beasts in order to escape destruction, 

 either from starvation or from being overcome and devoured in 

 contests with them ; and that any and every individual who was 

 a dunce at this kind of learning was in a short time eliminated. 

 Hence an aptness to notice and gain a knowledge of different 

 animals was essential to those who wished to survive, and a 

 faculty so necessary, and so constantly operative through long 

 ages, would be likely to leave traces in after-generations. 



Among all arboreal apes the ability firmly to hold on to the 

 branches is, of course, extremely important, and in consequence 

 they have developed a strong power of grip in the hands. The 

 late Frank Buckland compares the hands of an anthropoid ape to 

 grapnels, from their evident adaptation to this end. Nor does 

 this power exist only among adults, for although most apes, when 

 at rest, nurse their young on one arm, just as does a mother of 

 our own species, when, as often happens, they are fleeing from an 

 enemy, such as a leopard or some other tree-climbing carnivorous 

 animal, the mother would need all her hands to pass from branch 

 to branch with sufficient celerity to escape. Under such circum- 

 stances the infant ape must cling on to its mother as best it can ; 

 and naturalists who have repeatedly seen a troop of monkeys in 

 full flight state that the young ones as a rule hang beneath the 



