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 released 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 harmless 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 anything 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 varying 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 biting piglets, something like C's nocturnal fear of the wolf.[1] 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 respecting the correlation of bigness and strength, aided as this commonly is by information picked up from ethers, will amply suffice. 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. cit., p. 130.
