Part 2

Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human mind unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will feel the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in our grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single complete, inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so fused together by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We know that this is the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance at a ball, and see its form with a single act of mind. Yet that act became possible only after long drill in putting simpler perceptions together. Many a test of form, turning objects over and over, passing the hands round and round them, learning the absence of corners, the equality of diameters, did we go through in babyhood, many an inspection by eye, many an exercise of memory, connecting the peculiar arrangement of light and shade with the form as felt, before we could “see” a ball. Had this been understood in Froebel’s time, it would have made a material difference in his suggestions as to sense training in earliest infancy. So other powers that seem simple and inborn may perhaps be detected in the act of forming themselves out of simpler ones, if we watch babies closely enough, and it may lead us to revise some of our theories about education.

There are enthusiasts, indeed, who would have us believe that child study is going to revolutionize all our educational methods, but those who are surest of these wonderful results, and readiest to tell mothers and teachers what is the truly scientific thing to do with their children, are not the ones who have done the most serious first hand study of children. From indications so far, it is likely that the outcome of such study will oftener be to confirm some good old-fashioned ways of training (showing that they rested unconsciously on a sound psychological basis) than to discover new ways. No substitute has yet been found by scientific pedagogy for motherly good sense and devotion.

Yet the direct study of child minds does bring out some new suggestions of educational value, does give a verdict sometimes between old conflicting theories, and always makes us understand more clearly what we are doing with children. And on the purely scientific side there is one aspect of especial interest in genetic studies. That is, the possible light we may get on the past of the human race.

It has long been observed that there are curious resemblances between babies and monkeys, between boys and barbaric tribes. Schoolboys administer law among themselves much as a tribal court does; babies sit like monkeys, with the soles of their little feet facing each other. Such resemblances led, long before the age of Darwin, to the speculation that children in developing passed through stages similar to those the race had passed through; and the speculation has become an accepted doctrine since embryology has shown how each individual before birth passes in successive stages through the lower forms of life.

This series of changes in the individual is called by evolutionists the Ontogenic Series; and the similar series through which the race has passed in the myriads of ages of its evolution is called the Phylogenic.

Now, of these two versions of the great world history, the phylogenic is a worn and ancient volume, mutilated in many places, and often illegible. The most interesting chapter of all is torn out--that which records the passing over of man from brute to human, the beginning of true human reason, speech, and skill. The lowest living races are far beyond the transition line; the remains of the past can never tell us how it was crossed, for before man could leave anything more than bones--any products of his art, such as weapons, or signs of fire--he had traveled a long way from his first human condition.

But from the ontogenic record no chapter can be torn out: a fresh copy of the whole history, from alpha to omega, is written out every time an infant is conceived, and born, and grows to manhood. And somewhere on the way between the first cell of the embryo and maturity each one must repeat in his own life that wonderful transition into human intelligence. If we can thoroughly decipher tills ontogenic record, then, what may we not hope to learn of the road by which we human beings came?

We must not forget that the correspondence between these life books is only a rough one. They are versions of the same world story, but they have traveled far from their common origin, and have become widely unlike in details. The baby has to take many short cuts, and condense and omit inconceivably, to get through in a few brief years a development that the race took ages for. Even the order of development gets disarranged sometimes. For instance, primitive man probably reached a higher development before he could talk than babies have to now, after ages of talking ancestry: we must not look to a child just learning to talk, to get an idea of what the minds of men were like when they were just learning to talk. Again, the human child is carrying on under the influence of adults an evolution that primitive man worked out without help or hindrance from any one wiser than himself; and that makes a great difference in the way he does it.

The moral of all this is that people should be very cautious indeed in drawing parallels between the child and the race, and especially in basing educational theories on them. But if one is cautious enough and patient enough, there are many hints about our race history to be found in every nursery. Some of these I shall relate in the following chapters.

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Most studies of children deal with later childhood, the school years; and these are almost always statistical in their method, taking the individual child very little into account. My own study has been of babyhood, and its method has been biographical. It is hard to get statistics about babies, scattered as they are, one by one, in different homes, not massed in schoolrooms. Now and then a doctor has found material for good comparative investigations, and much effort has been spent in trying to gather up measurements of babies’ growth; but on the whole the most fruitful method so far has been the biographical one--that of watching one baby’s development, day by day, and recording it.

I am often asked if the results one gets in this way are not misleading, since each child might differ greatly from others. One must, of course, use great caution in drawing general conclusions from a single child, but in many things all babies are alike, and one learns to perceive pretty well which are the things. Babyhood is mainly taken up with the development of the large, general racial powers; individual differences are less important than in later childhood. And the biographical method of child study has the inestimable advantage of showing the process of evolution going on, the actual unfolding of one stage out of another, and the steps by which the changes come about. No amount of comparative statistics could give this. If I should find out that a thousand babies learned to stand at an average age of forty-six weeks and two days, I should not know as much that is important about standing, as a stage in human progress, as I should after watching a single baby carefully through the whole process of achieving balance on his little soles.

Yet there are not many baby biographies in existence. There are scarcely half a dozen records that are full and consecutive enough to be at all entitled to the name, and even of more fragmentary ones the number in print as separate essays is scarcely larger. A good many more, however, have been available in manuscript to students, and many mothers no doubt keep such little notebooks. These notes are often highly exact and intelligent, as far as they go (I have found this especially true of the notebooks of members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ), and afford important corroborations here and there to more continuous records.

It was the Germans who first thought baby life worth recording, and the most complete and scientific of all the records is a German one. The first record known was published in the last century by a Professor Tiedemann--a mere slip of an essay, long completely forgotten, but resuscitated about the middle of this century, translated into French (and lately into English), and used by all students of the subject. Some of its observations we must, with our present knowledge, set down as erroneous; but it is on the whole exact and valuable, and a remarkable thing for a man to have done more than a hundred years ago.

Perhaps Darwin, in 1840, was the next person to take notes of an infant’s development; but they were taken only incidentally to another study, and were not published for more than thirty years (partly in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1873, partly in a magazine article in 1877). They are scanty but important. In the interval before they were published two or three small records had been published in Germany, and at least one paper, that of M. Taine, in France.

In 1881, the first edition of Professor Preyer’s “model record” was published, and before his death, in 1897, it had reached its third edition in Germany, and had been widely circulated in America in Mr. Brown’s excellent translation, “The Senses and the Will,” and “The Development of the Intellect.” It did more to stimulate and direct the study of infancy than any other publication. It has, however, the limitations that were to be expected from Professor Preyer’s special training as a physiologist, and is meagre on the side of mental, moral, and emotional development. Professor Sully’s “Extracts from a Father’s Diary,” published in part in 1881 and 1884 and fully in 1896, is richer on these sides, and also more readable.

Within the present decade, it is worth observing, the principal records have been American, not German, and have been written by women. Outside of America, only men, usually university professors, have made extended records. Professor Preyer and Professor Sully have both appealed in vain to their countrywomen to keep such records, holding up American women for emulation. My “Notes on the Development of a Child” were published in 1893 and 1899. In 1896 appeared Mrs. Hall’s “The First 500 Days of a Child’s Life,” a brief record, and confined to a short period, but a very good one, and perhaps the best for use as a guide by any one who wishes to keep a record and finds Preyer too technical. Mrs. Moore’s “Mental Development of a Child” is quite as much a psychological study as a record, but is based on full biographical notes; it will be more used by students than general readers. Mrs. Hogan’s “A Study of a Child,” 1898, is less scholarly than the others, but has a great deal of useful material; it does not begin at birth, however, but with the fourteenth month.

Perhaps I should say a word here as to the way in which I came to make a baby biography, for I am often asked how one should go to work at it. It was not done in my case for any scientific purpose, for I did not feel competent to make observations of scientific value. But I had for years desired an opportunity to see the wonderful unfolding of human powers out of the limp helplessness of the new-born baby; to watch this fascinating drama of evolution daily, minutely, and with an effort to understand it as far as I could, for my own pleasure and information. I scarcely know whence the suggestion had come; probably almost by inheritance, for my mother and grandmother had both been in somewhat notable degree observers of the development of babies’ minds. But, unlike them, I had the notebook habit from college and editorial days, and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of a large mass of data.

A few days after my own notes began I obtained Professor Preyer’s record, and without it I should have found the earliest weeks quite unintelligible. For some months my notes were largely memoranda of the likenesses and differences between my niece’s development and that of Preyer’s boy, and I still think this is the best way for a new observer to get started. As time went on, I departed more and more from the lines of Preyer’s observations, and after the first year was little influenced by them. Later, I devoted a good deal of study to the notes, and tried to analyze their scientific results.

There is one question that I have been asked a hundred times about baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it make them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first this seemed to me an odd misapprehension--as if people supposed observing children meant doing something to them. But I have no doubt it could be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There are thousands of parents who tell anecdotes about children before their faces every day in the year, and if such a parent turns child student it is hard to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting a child’s mind openly, questioning the little one about himself, and experimenting with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is as worthless scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of an observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose simplicity and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no competent observer tampers with the child in any way. If Professor Preyer, observing the baby as he first grasps at objects, notes down the way in which he misdirects his inexpert little hands; if Mrs. Barus keeps record of her boy’s favorite playthings; if I sit by the window and catch with my pencil my niece’s prattle as she plays about below--and if these babies afterward turn out spoiled, the mischief must be credited to some other agency than the silent notebook.

Even direct experimenting on a child is not so bad as it sounds. When you show a baby his father’s photograph to see if he recognizes it, you are experimenting on him. The only difference between the child student’s experimenting and that which all the members of the family are doing all day with the baby, is that the student knows better what he is trying to find out, and that he writes it down.

Probably women are more skillful than men in quietly following the course of the child’s mind, even leading him to reveal himself without at all meddling with him or marring his simplicity. It has been so in a marked degree in the cases I have seen. But no one who has good judgment will allow himself to spoil both the child and his own observation; and any one who has not good judgment will find plenty of ways to spoil a child more potent than observing him.

THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENTS.

“Its first act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then long, thin, tearless á--á, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic, but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red, shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged, it is not strange that, if the mother has not followed Froebel’s exhortations and come to love her child before birth, there is a brief interval occasionally dangerous to the child before the maternal instinct is fully aroused.”

It cannot be denied that this unflattering description is fair enough, and our baby was no handsomer than the rest of her kind. The little boy uncle, who had been elated to hear that his niece resembled him, looked shocked and mortified when he saw her. Yet she did not lack admirers. I have never noticed that women (even those who are not mothers) mind a few little æsthetic defects, such as these that President Hall mentions, with so many counterbalancing charms in the little warm, soft, living thing.

Nor is it women only who find the new baby enchanting--in Germany, at least. Semmig, whose “Tagebuch eines Vaters” is one of the earliest attempts at a record, is delighted even with the “dismal and monotonous cry.” “Heavenly music of the first cry!” he exclaims, “sacred voice of life, first sound of the poem of a heart, first note of the symphony of human life, thou echo of God’s word! What sound is like unto thee?” “Yes, it is so: the cry of the baby is music! When it is still, especially in the night, one is uneasy; one longs for this primitive expression of the little being, and is consoled, enraptured, when the helpless creature breaks into loud wails, and says to us: I live, give me what I need! Oh, cry of the baby in the night, nightingale song for mother and father!”

Our baby was at least a handsome one from the doctor’s point of view, strong, healthy, and well formed; and this is to be taken into account as a determining factor in all the record that follows.

I thought that she must be out of the normal in the matter of legs, so oddly brief were the fat little members. Afterward I learned that all babies are built that way--and indeed that they are altogether so different in structure from the grown man that Dr. Oppenheim, in his book on “The Development of the Child,” comes near to saying that we must regard the infant as a different animal form from the adult, almost as the caterpillar is different from the butterfly. Common speech recognizes this in the case of several of the higher animals, naming the young form as differently as if it were a different species. We say a colt, a calf, a puppy, a baby; not a young horse, cow, dog, or man.