The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

A few days later she showed that she knew at least the feeling of her mother’s arms. For some weeks no one else had put her to sleep; and now when sleepy she fretted in other arms, but nestled down contentedly and went to sleep as soon as she felt herself in her mother’s. The association of that especial feeling had become necessary to sleep.

The instinctive language of sign and sound had developed a good deal. From the first day of the month, the baby’s joy in sights began to be expressed more exuberantly, with flying arms and legs, with panting, murmuring, and babbling, smiles and even small chuckles, and sometimes little shouts and crows. A new look of grief, too, the parallelogram shaped mouth that all babies make in crying, appeared.

In the tenth week she began to turn her head aside in refusal or dislike—a gesture that one may see far down in the animal kingdom. A dog, for instance, uses it very expressively. It comes plainly from the simple effort to turn away from what is unpleasant, and develops later to our shake of the head for “No;” and when we notice how early the development of control over head and neck is, how much in advance of any use of the hands, we see that it is natural for this to be the oldest of all gestures.

In the last days of the month came two notable evidences of growing will. One was the baby’s persistent effort to get the tip of her rattle (it was set on a slender ivory shaft) into her mouth. Sometimes it went in by chance; sometimes it hit her lip, and in that case she would stretch her mouth to take it in, moving her head rather than the rattle. But if it brought up against her cheek, too far away to be captured by such efforts, after trying a little, she would lower the rattle, and make a fresh start for better luck.

This may seem highly unintelligent action; yet after all, as Professor Morgan says, it is by the method of “trial and error” that most of our acts of skill (and perhaps all such acts of the lower animals) are learned. In trial after trial the baby associated the muscular feeling of the successful movement with the feeling of the rattle tip in her mouth, and repeated these movements more and more correctly, dropping the unsuccessful ones. In just this way the sharpshooter, through repeated trials and misses, learns to deflect his rifle barrel this way and that with an infinite fineness of muscular contractions, which he could never get by reasoning on it.

The other effort of will was in sitting up. During the whole month the baby had insisted on a sitting position, and had wailed as vigorously over being left flat on her back as over being left hungry. She had soon tried to take the matter into her own hands, and made many efforts to lift herself, sometimes by pulling on our fingers when we had laid them in her hands, sometimes by sheer strain of the abdominal muscles. She never succeeded in raising more than her head and shoulders till the last week of the month: then she did once lift herself, and in the following days tried with the utmost zeal to repeat the success. She would strive and strain, with a grave and earnest face, her whole baby soul evidently centred on the achievement. She would tug at our fingers till her little face was crimson; she would lift her head and shoulders and strain to rise higher, fall back and try it again, till she was tired out. The day she was three months old, she tried twenty-five times, with scarcely a pause, and even then, though she was beginning to fret pitifully with disappointment, she did not stop of her own accord.

Unless she began with a somewhat high reclining position, or her feet or hips were held, her little legs would fly up, and she could not get the leverage to lift her body. For that matter, even with us the legs are lighter than the trunk, and few women can overcome the difference, and lift themselves by sheer strength of the abdominal muscles, without having the feet held: and a baby’s legs are so much lighter than ours that it must be for several years a sheer impossibility for him to do it.

However, in the few cases when the baby did manage, by some advantage of position, or by holding to our fingers, to lift herself, she could not balance in the least, and toppled over at once. What with this discouragement, and restraint from her elders, who thought her back by no means strong enough yet for sitting alone, she soon after gave up the effort to raise herself, and waited till she was older.

It was in this same eventful thirteenth week that the baby first looked about, searching for something that was out of sight. A lively young girl with bright color and a charming pair of dangling eye-glasses was visiting us, and stood by, laughing and prattling to the baby while she was bathed. The little one, greatly interested, turned her head, smiling and crowing, to watch Miss Charmian’s movements, and to look for her when she was out of sight. In this, as in the definite efforts to feel the rattle tip in her mouth, and to renew the sensations of sitting up, we see action guided by an idea of that which is absent, that is by imagination, to a certain extent at least; though it is probable that there was still as much of the mere working of association as of definite ideas. The memory that the baby showed when she looked about, searching for an expected sight, instead of simply turning to an accustomed place, is clearly more than mere habit memory. Yet it was still not true memory: it was not an idea coming back to the mind after an interval, but only a sort of after-shine of the thing, held in the mind for a few moments after the thing itself had disappeared.

And now to come back to the sight-motor series: Did the baby still see objects only as blurs of light and shade? She had the full mechanism of her eyes in working order as soon as accommodation was acquired; but it is certain that it takes much practice to learn to use that mechanism. It is an old story that people born blind, receiving their sight by surgical operations, have to learn to see. Professor Preyer quotes from Dr. Home the case of a twelve year old boy who, nearly a month after the operation, could not tell whether a square card had corners or not by looking at it; and of another seven year old boy who had to learn to recognize triangles and squares (which he knew well by touch) by running his eye along the edges and counting the corners. It must have taken immense practice for us all to learn to flash the eye so quickly over and about an object that we seem to take in its shape with one look. This was the task that lay before the baby now.