The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

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?