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.
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.