Science in the Magazines

Abstract

EVERY individual, as Prof. Milnes Marshall used to say, climbs up his own genealogical tree. Embryology shows how human lineaments are developed from a widely typical animal form, and evidences of the same relationship can be obtained from the study of the infant after birth. In the Fortnightly Prof. Sully pleads for such study. “Ours is a scientific age,“remarks he,” and science has cast its inquisitive eye on the infant. We want to know what happens in the first all-decisive two or three years of human life, by what steps exactly the wee amorphous thing takes shape and bulk, both physically and mentally. And we can now speak of the beginning of a careful and methodical investigation of child nature by men trained in scientific observation. This line of inquiry, started by physicians, as the German Sigismund, in connection with their special professional aims, has been carried on by a number of fathers and others having access to the infant, among whom it may be enough to name Darwin and Preyer.” The biologist is able to use the physical development of a child to show man's kinship to the lower animal world, and the development of an infant's mind indicates to the psychologist how the mental history of the race has been evolved. It does not need a very acute observer to see the intellectual and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and children. Several anthropologists have studied this phase of child-life, and have found it full of interest. The difficulty is to get systematic and scientific observations of children. Prof. Sully shows that the work is worth doing, and indicates some of the lines of study to be followed; all that is needed is methodical and trustworthy registration of the successive stages in the child's development.