The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with them. Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can prove anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether babies have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have ideas that came direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and yet might not enter into our inheritance of these at once.

To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s mind, it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition of her senses and consciousness—though without the careful special investigations certain physiologists had made before, I should have found it blind guessing as to how much she really did see, hear, and feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside her little mind, and could only be inferred from her behavior.

She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to gentle light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report also a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the case of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of the eyes toward a person coming near her—that is, toward a large dark mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be regarded as entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward the light, and among animal movements this is one of the most primitive; while the habit of looking toward any dark moving mass runs far back in animal history, and may well have become fixed in the bodily mechanism. With the beginning of voluntary looking these instinctive movements fade.

No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of focus for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move always in unison,—and as the lids also had by no means learned yet to move symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some extraordinary and alarming contortions resulted.

True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of opening the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great deal of minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the lenses, and it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs of light and dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has learned the adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only, for no trace of color sense has ever been detected within the first fortnight of life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year.

The baby showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day, when she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight feet from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds—oftener the rustling of paper than anything else—could make her start or cry.

It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists that babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to several days after birth. The outer tube of the ear is often closed by its own walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even after the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are noticed; perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps because sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort of blur, just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee babies is to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements, it is well for them that hearing is so tardy in development.

There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on the next.

In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If a baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he felt a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.

Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning till much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to account for the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she was not hungry she would suck the most tasteless object as cheerfully as any other. Physiologists, however, have had the daring to make careful test of smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee drop of quinine, sugar, salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues, and strong odors to their noses, and have been made certain by the resulting behavior that these senses do exist from the first. But it requires rather strong tests to call them into action. Many babies, for instance, suck at a two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were sugar; so it seems unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of milk, and the neutral smells by which any well-kept baby is surrounded, are really perceived at all. There are instances related of very positive discrimination between one milk and another, either by taste or smell, shown by very young babies; yet the weight of evidence points to an almost dormant condition of these two senses.