The biography of a baby

The baby entered on her second month well content with her fragmentary little world of glancing lights and shining surfaces, chords and voices, disconnected touches and motions. Her smiles began to be frequent and jolly. It was always at faces that she smiled now: nothing else seemed half as entertaining. The way in which a baby, in these early weeks, gazes and gazes up into one’s face, and smiles genially at it, wiles the very heart out of one; but the baby means little enough by it.

In this fortnight her pleasures were enlarged by introduction to a baby carriage. The outdoor sights and sounds were of course wasted on her at this stage of her seeing and hearing powers; but she liked the feeling of the motion, and lay and enjoyed it with a tranquilly beatific look. Perhaps also the fresher air and larger light sent some dim wave of pleasant feeling through her body.

Some days earlier, when carried out in arms for her first outdoor visit, she had found the light dazzling, and kept her eyes tight shut. In all I have said of babies’ pleasure in light, I have meant moderate light: the little eyes are easily hurt by a glare. There are nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light: our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like other folk.

Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her knees in the bath every day.

With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This, too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex expressions.

The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week; but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides. At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every nursery,—the first time she had done this,—and it was fully five minutes before her face was tranquil again.

There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me (and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical shock, led the way into the emotional life.

This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears earliest of all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before.

And now the baby had come to six weeks old, and could hold up her head perfectly for a quarter of a minute at a time, and liked greatly to be held erect or in sitting position. Apparently all this was for the sake of seeing better, for her joys still centred in her eyes. She had made no advance in visual power, however, except that within a few days she could follow with her eyes the motion of a person passing near her.

Human faces were still the most entertaining of all objects. She gazed at them with her utmost look of intentness, making movements with her hands, and panting in short, audible breaths. Nothing else had ever excited her so, except once a spot of sunlight on her white bed.

There were signs that her experiences gathered more and more into groups in her mind, by association. I have spoken of her earlier association between the nursing position and being fed; now she would check her hungry crying as soon as she felt herself lifted; and a few days later, as soon as her mouth was washed out—a ceremony that invariably came before nursing. At seven weeks old she opened her mouth for the nipple on being laid in the proper position. The food association group was enlarging; but sight did not yet enter into it: the look of the breast did not seem to bring the faintest suggestion of satisfied hunger, and the baby would lie and cry with her lips an inch from it. This is natural, for she could never really have seen it at this stage of the development of vision.

I have said that in such associations there is a germ of memory. There is a sort of habit memory, too, that appears very early. Impressions that have been received over and over gather a sort of familiarity in the baby’s mind; and while he does not yet recognize the familiar things themselves, yet he feels a change from them as something strange—it jars somehow the even current of his feelings. Or where impressions have been especially agreeable, they are vaguely missed when they are absent. The consciousness of difference between society and solitude, which our baby had showed at the end of the first month, was habit memory of this sort.

Professor Preyer thinks that his baby showed habit memory as early as the first week, perceiving a new food to be different from the old. Our baby (who knew no food but mother’s milk) experienced a new taste once or twice, when dosed for colic, and never showed the faintest sense of novelty at it till she was six weeks old. Then she was given a little sugar for hiccoughs, and made a face of what seemed high disgust over it; but this particular face has been observed more than once, and is known to be common in babies at a new taste, even a pleasant one. It seems to be caused by a sort of surprise affecting the face muscles.

A few days later the baby showed surprise more plainly. She lay making cheerful little sounds, and suddenly, by some new combination of the vocal organs, a small, high crow came out—doubtless causing a most novel sensation in the little throat, not to speak of the odd sound. The baby fell silent instantly, and a ludicrous look of astonishment overspread her face. Here was not only evidence of the germs of memory, but also the appearance of a new emotion, that of genuine surprise; and, like fright, it is one that is closely related to simple nerve shock. From being startled to being surprised (as to being frightened) is not a long step.

I have just spoken of the baby as making little sounds. This was a new accomplishment. Until a few days before, she had made no sounds except some inarticulate fretting noises, the occasional short outcry when startled, and the “dismal and monotonous” cry that began with the first day. This original cry was clearly on the vowel â (as in fair), with a nasal prefix—ngâ; but late in the sixth week it began to be varied a little. In the fretting, too, a few syllables appeared. The new sounds were mostly made in the open throat, and grew out of the old ngâ by slight changes in the position of the vocal organs—ng, and hng, and hng-â; but now and then there was a short wă, gă, or hă, or even a lip sound, as m-bă.

It has been said that the broad Italian ä is of all sounds the easiest, the one naturally made from an open throat: but the records show both German and American babies beginning with the flat â or shorter ă. Our baby scarcely used any other vowel sound for weeks yet.

Little sounds of content, too, began in the sixth week—mainly inarticulate grunts and cooing murmurs; but in the course of the seventh week, besides the sudden crow, there were a few tiny shouts,—a-a-ha,—a gurgle, and some hard g sounds, ga, and g-g-g, which passed in the eighth week into a roughened gh, a sort of scraping, gargling sound, not in the English language.

Our baby had a leaning to throat sounds; but other babies begin with the lip sounds, and some, it is said, with the trilling l and r. It seems to be only chance what position of the vocal organs is first used; but after once beginning to articulate, the baby seems to pass from sound to sound by slight changes (probably made accidentally in using the old sounds), and so goes through the list with some regularity.

This practice in sounds may be at first quite without will, a mere overflow of energy into the vocal organs; but it is highly important none the less, for any creature that is to use human speech must get the speaking muscles into most delicate training. Think what fine and exact difference in muscular contractions we must make to be able to say “ball,” and be sure that it will not come out “pall”!

For a week or two now the baby made a good deal of progress in control of her body. She strove valiantly every day to keep her head erect, and made some little advance. In the bath she began to push with her feet against the foot of the tub, so hard that her mother could not keep the little head from bumping on the other end. She pulled downward with her arms when her mother held them up in wiping her. These pushing and pulling movements may have been made for the pleasure of the feeling, or they may have been involuntary. Perhaps they were accidental movements, passing gradually into voluntary ones. In either case, as they developed, the old irregular movements of legs and arms passed away, as those of the head and face had done before.

One new bit of muscular control was undoubtedly voluntary—a trick of putting out and drawing back the tip of her tongue between her pursed lips. And this was something more than just one new voluntary movement. The important thing was that she was using the movement to bring together the evidence of two different senses into one perception.

When something touches against our fingers, we have one sort of feeling in them, and quite another when we pass them over the thing and “feel of it;” and this other, clearer feeling is really a compound one, made up of the touch sensation in the skin and the muscle sensation in the moving fingers. It is called “active touch,” and it is a wonderful key to the world around us—so wonderful that with this alone it proved possible to educate Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. This active touch the baby had now developed in tongue and lips; not yet in the fingers.

The passive sensation of light had already been blended with muscle sensation in something the same way, by the voluntary movement of turning and focusing the eyes; but that complete seeing which we might call “active sight” is a more complex power than active feeling, and there were other associations yet to be made before it could be fully built up. And I hope it will not spoil the interest of the story of the baby’s sense development if I say here that the plot is going to turn mainly on these two combinations, muscle sense with sight and muscle sense with touch; and then recombination of these two with each other—all welded together by voluntary movements, growing out of involuntary ones.

All this time the baby had had a daily source of placid pleasure in listening to chords on the piano—no longer heavy staccato chords, but flowing ones, in the middle octaves. The baby of theory cares for nothing but eating and sleeping; but our baby, even after she was already fretting with hunger, would forget all about it for ten minutes, if one would take her to the piano. Hunger, after it grew really strong, was a sensation that swept all before it; but on the whole, food was a matter of small interest compared with the world of light and touch and sound.

As for sleep, the baby slept, from the first, in pretty long periods,—six and seven hours was not uncommon,—and was wide awake between sleeps. At such times she would lie by the half hour, looking peacefully about her, or gazing into our faces with smiles. When we nodded, laughed, and talked to her, her smiles seemed like friendly responses; but this could have meant nothing, except that with our demonstrations those little constellations of high lights and glitters, our faces, bobbed and twinkled in a more amusing manner than ever.

At eight weeks old came the final stage in mastery of the mechanism of vision—the power of accommodation, or adjusting the lenses for different distances. It may have been present even earlier: it is a hard thing for the observer to know. But the indications are that it really did happen when I thought, the day the baby was eight weeks old. She was lying on her mother’s knees, fixing an unusually serious and attentive gaze on my face, and would not take her eyes away; indeed, as her mother turned her in undressing, she screwed her head around comically to keep her eyes fixed. At last, after some fifteen minutes, she turned her head clear over, and gazed as earnestly at her mother’s face. To see what she would do, her mother turned her again toward me, and once more she surveyed me for a time, and again turned her head and looked directly at her mother.

What was in the little mind? Was she beginning to discriminate and compare, for the first time setting apart as two separate things the two faces that had bent over her oftenest? Or was she simply using, on the most convenient object, a new power of adjusting her eyes, which filled her with serious interest by the new clearness it gave to what she saw? At all events, she would not have looked from one to the other with such long and attentive regard if she had not been able to focus both faces, at their different distances; so that I felt sure the power of accommodation was really there.

But there was more in the incident than just the advance in vision. Hitherto when the baby had turned her head to look, it had been only at something that she had already a glimpse of, off at the edge of the field of vision. Now she turned to look for something quite out of sight,—something, therefore, that must have been present as an idea in the little mind, or she could not have looked for it. And in view of what I have said of the mother’s face as the great educational appliance in the early months, it is worth noticing that it was this which gave the baby her first idea, so far as I could detect.

We come a step nearer, too, to true memory, when the baby can keep thus, even for a few minutes, the idea of something formerly seen. It was still mainly habit memory, however. She looked for an accustomed sight in an accustomed place, bringing it to the point of clear vision by an accustomed movement of the neck muscles. There was no evidence till considerably later that she was capable of remembering a single, special experience.

The next day she was singularly bright and sunny, smiling all day at every one. She stopped in the middle of nursing to throw her head back and gaze at the bow at her mother’s neck, and would not go on with the comparatively uninteresting business of food till the bow was put out of sight. That night she slept eight hours at a stretch, longer than she had ever done. Was the little brain, perhaps, wearied with the new rush of impressions, which came with the new power of focusing?

The day after she would lie a while unusually silent and sober, looking about her and moving her hands a little; then she would fret to be lifted and held against one’s shoulder, where she could hold her head up and look about. She was able now to hold it up a long time by resting it for a few seconds every half minute or so, against my cheek, which I held close to give her the chance. But to-day she was not satisfied with having her head erect: she persistently straightened her back up against the arm that supported her—a new set of muscles thus coming under control of her will. As often as I pressed her down against my shoulder, she would fret, and straighten up again and set to work diligently looking about her.

After this her progress in holding up her head was suddenly rapid, and by the end of the month, four days later, she could balance it for many minutes, with a little wobbling. This uncertainty soon disappeared, and the erect position of the head was accomplished for life.

During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted. Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. As soon as she was held erect, or propped up sitting amid cushions, she was content; but the first time that she was allowed to be up thus most of the day, she slept afterward nine unbroken hours, recuperating, probably, quite as much from the looking and the taking in that the little brain and eyes had been doing as from any muscular fatigue there may have been in the position.

Such is the “mere life of vegetation” the baby lived during the first two months. No grown person ever experiences such an expansion of life, such a progress from power to power in that length of time. Nor was our little girl’s development anything unusual for a healthy, well-conditioned child, so far as other records give material for comparison. Preyer’s boy was later than she in getting his head balanced, but he arrived at full accommodation (and that is the most important work of the first two months) at almost exactly the same age as she; and so did Mrs. Hall’s boy. I do not know of any other records that make a clear statement on this point.