The biography of a baby

“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.

We call a baby a little copy of the man, but really if he were magnified to man’s size and strength, we should regard him at first glance as an idiot and monster, with enormous head and abdomen, short legs, and no neck, not to speak of the flat-nosed, prognathous face; and on the other hand, a baby that was really a small copy of man’s body would seem positively uncanny. We see this in old pictures, where the artist tried to depict babies by placing small-sized men and women in the mother’s arms.

The middle point of the baby’s length falls a little above the navel, the abdomen and legs together making up a little more than half the whole length; in the man the legs alone make a trifle more than half. In proportion to the baby’s total weight, its brain weighs seven times as much as a grown person’s, its muscles little more than half as much.

“The two [man and baby] do not breathe alike, their pulse rates are not alike, the composition of their bodies is not alike.” The baby’s body at birth is 74.7 per cent. water, ours 58.5 per cent. It is largely due to its loose, watery structure that the baby’s brain is so heavy—which shows the folly of trying to compare mental powers by means of brain weights, as is so often done in discussing woman’s sphere. As Donaldson says, if there were anything in that basis of comparison, the new-born baby would be the intellectual master of us all. The baby has bright red and watery marrow, instead of the yellow, fatty substance in our bones; and its blood differs so from ours in proportion of red and white corpuscles and in chemical make-up as to “amount almost to a difference in kind,” says Dr. Oppenheim, who adds that such a condition of marrow or blood, if found in a grown person, would be considered an indication of disease.

The organs are differently placed within the body, and even differently formed. The bony structure is everywhere soft and unfinished, the plates of the skull imperfectly fitted together, with gaps at the corners; and it is well that they are, for if the brain box were closed tight the brain within could never grow. Surgeons have lately even made artificial openings where the skull was prematurely perfect, to save the baby from idiocy. The bony inclosures of the middle ear are quite unfinished, so that on the one side catarrhal inflammations from the nose and throat travel up to the ear more readily than in later life, while on the other side ear inflammations are more likely to pass into the brain. The spine is straight, like an ape’s, instead of having the double curve of human-kind, which seems to be brought about by the pull of the muscles after we have come to stand erect.

I have quoted these details from Oppenheim, and from Vierordt’s and Roberts’s measurements, as given by Dr. Burk (“Growth of Children in Height and Weight.”) Some of the figures are given otherwise by other authorities. I might fill many pages with similar details. Some of these differences do not disappear till full manhood, others are gone in a few weeks after birth. And in them all there is so constant a repetition of lower animal forms that anatomists are brought to a confidence in the “recapitulation doctrine,” such as they can hardly give to others by means of a few sample facts.

The most curious of all the monkey traits shown by the new-born baby is the one investigated by Dr. Louis Robinson (“Nineteenth Century,” November, 1891). It was suggested by “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” The question was raised in conversation whether a limp and molluscous baby, unable so much as to hold up its head on its helpless little neck, could do anything so positive as to “rastle with” Kentuck’s finger; and the more knowing persons present insisted that a young baby does, as a matter of fact, have a good firm hand-clasp. It occurred to Dr. Robinson that if this was true it was a beautiful Darwinian point, for clinging and swinging by the arms would naturally have been a specialty with our ancestors if they ever lived a monkey-like life in the trees. The baby that could cling best to its mother as she used hands, feet, and tail to flee in the best time over the trees, or to get at the more inaccessible fruits and eggs in time of scarcity, would be the baby that lived to bequeath his traits to his descendants; so that to this day our housed and cradled human babies would keep in their clinging powers a reminiscence of our wild treetop days.

Dr. Robinson was fortunate enough to be able to test his theory on some sixty babies in the first hours of their life, and was triumphantly successful. He clasped their hands about a slender rod, and they swung from it like athletes, without apparent discomfort, by the half minute; many of us grown people could not do as well. Such a remarkable power of hands and arms has for ages been of no especial use to the human race, and it fades out in a few weeks, but for many months the arms keep ahead of the legs in development.

Here was not only strength of arms, but the ability to perform quite skillfully an action, that required the working together of a number of muscles to a definite end,—the action namely, of clasping an object with the hand. This is one of several actions that come ready-made to the baby at birth, before he can possibly have had any chance to learn them, or any idea of what they are for. Babies sneeze, swallow, and cry on the first day; they shut their eyes at a bright light, or at a touch. On the first day, moreover, they have been seen to start at a sound or a jar; Preyer observed hiccoughing, choking, coughing, and spreading the toes when the soles were tickled; and Darwin saw yawning and stretching within the first week, though I do not know that any one has seen it on the first day.

These movements are all of the class called reflex,—movements, that is, in which the bodily mechanism is set off by some outside action on the senses, as a gun is set off by a touch on the trigger. Thus, when a tickling affects the mucous membrane, a sneeze executes itself without any will of ours; when our sense of sight perceives a swift missile coming, the neck muscles mechanically jerk the head to one side.

We grown people have, however, a good deal of power of holding in our reflexes,—“inhibiting” them, as the technical expression is,—but the baby has none at all. If they had a highly developed reflex activity, babies would be in real danger from the unrestrained acts of their own muscles, as we see in the case of convulsions, which show reflex action at its extreme. But the actions I have mentioned are about all the reflex movements that have been noted in new-born babies, except what are called the periodic reflexes, such as breathing, the heartbeat, the contractions of the arteries, and all the regular muscular actions of organic life.

That so complex a system of movement as these periodic reflexes should be so readily touched into motion upon contact with air and food, to maintain itself afterward by the interplay of the bodily mechanism and external forces, shows a ready-made hereditary activity far more than the sudden reflexes do. It does not work quite smoothly at first, however: the establishment of breathing, for instance, is irregular, and often difficult. Even the sudden reflexes are slower and less perfect than with older people.

There is another class of movements, often confused with the reflex—that is, instinctive movements. Real grasping (as distinguished from reflex grasping), biting, standing, walking, are examples of this class. They are race movements, the habits of the species to which the animal belongs, and every normal member of the species is bound to come to them; yet they are not so fixed in the bodily mechanism as the reflex movements. The stimulus to them seems to come more from within than from without—yet not from reason and will, but from some blind impulse. This impulse is usually imperfect, and the child has to work his own way to the mastery of the movements. Yet though certain reflex activities are inherited in a more highly developed condition than any human instincts, the instincts are at bottom always hereditary, which is not the case with the reflexes—any one may teach his muscles new reflex movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every time that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of their own accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct cannot be thus acquired.

The amazing instincts of the lower animals; the imperfect and broken condition of the instincts in man, yet the deep hold that they have on him; the mingling of inherited necessity and individual freedom in the way in which they are worked out; the mystery of the physiological method by which they act (while that of reflex movement is fairly well understood, up to a certain point); the light they seem always about to shed for the biologist on the profoundest problems of heredity, and for the philosopher on those of free will and personality,—these things make instinct one of the great fields of present research, and I must not venture into it, though it is of importance in trying to understand a baby.

I shall say only that while instinct does not appear in the lowest animals (whose action is all of the reflex type), and is for a time a sign of rising rank in the scale of life, it reaches its culmination with the insects, and as we approach man it is the breaking up of the instincts that is in its turn a sign of advancement to higher life. The little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and even the monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months. Nothing is so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness is our glory, for it means that the activities of the race (as John Fiske has so clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too infrequently repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before birth; hence the long period after birth before the child comes to full human powers. It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent lesson of common observation) that while an organism is thus immature and plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human race.

The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world already developed is half a mere reflex act—that of sucking. It is started as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil, finger, or nipple, it may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a reflex after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this external stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to begin when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex character, that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct.

These two types of automatic movement (for instinct, however complicated later with volition, gives rise in these earliest days to none but automatic movement) are both “purposive,” though not purposed—that is, they are actions that are plainly adapted to some end by ancestral intelligence or by natural selection. But there was another type of movements more conspicuous in our baby than either, and apparently quite nonpurposive. From the first day she moved slightly, but almost constantly, the legs drawing up, the arms stirring, the eyes and head rolling a little. Sometimes the features were distorted with vague and meaningless grimaces. Most other observers report these movements, and inexperienced ones say that the baby “felt with his hands about his face,” or “tried to get his hands to his head.” Any mother may convince herself that the baby has no will in the matter by watching till he really does begin to try, weeks later, to turn his head, put his hands to his mouth, kick up his legs: the difference in the whole manner of the action is evident.

An odd explanation has been offered for these movements by Dr. Mumford, an English physiologist. He holds that they have a singular resemblance to those of swimming amphibians; that their prototype may be seen in any aquarium; they are, in short, survivals of the period long before the ape-like stage, long before any mammalian stage, when our ancestors had not yet abandoned life in the waters.

Now, although it is quite true that biologists believe that if our ancestry is traced far enough, it does lead back to the water, still it seems hardly possible that in a human baby, whose structure passed the amphibian stage long before birth, the most frequent movements should hark back to that tremendous antiquity. It is more likely that Preyer’s explanation is the correct one: viz., that the movements are simply due to the rapid growth of nerve centres, which causes an overflow of nervous force to the muscles and makes them contract at haphazard. A certain regularity is given to these chance movements by the tendency of nerve impulse to flow in the same paths where it has flowed before, rather than in new ones, so that the muscles are drawn toward the position they occupied before birth. This brings the hands constantly up about the head—a fact that later has important results in development.

These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.”

There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.

Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton; and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it would be a bold psychologist who should try to say what germ of thought and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the capacity of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a capacity is a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing baby of nursery tradition would be.

If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is at a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the soul from its invisible germ—a drama that sometimes fairly catches one’s breath in the throat with excitement and wonder.