In this blithe recognition of the irregular in others’ behaviour we have the rudiment of an appreciation of the laughable, not only as a violation of rule but as a loss of dignity. This is apparent in such cases as the boy’s laughter at the prostrate form of his sister, illumined as {214} it was by the observation that, at the age of twenty-six months, he expressed great contempt at the spectacle of a Japanese gentleman stretched on the grass in the suburban Heath, which was the child’s daily resort, and which he seemed strongly disposed to subject to his own code of manners. Possibly, too, there was a touch of this appreciation of lowered dignity when the same boy, at the age of twenty-eight months, laughed greatly on seeing his father batter in an old hat. The laughter, complicated now by a new element of conscious superiority, probably took on a crowing note, though our dull ears may not be equal to a clear detection of the change. Not only so, it is possible that the laughter of children, common in the second year, at signs of disorderliness in the hair or dress of others, and especially superiors, implies a perception of something like lowered rank. In this effect of the new in the visible world different tones of mirth are no doubt distinguishable. As the higher forms of perception begin to develop the primitive laughter of joy may persist and combine with later and more specialised kinds. Ruth’s voicing of merriment, in the thirteenth month, on having a new pair of mittens put on her, was largely an outburst of joy, though some dim sense of the oddity of the thing probably combined with this. On the other hand, the laughter called forth in the little girl M., at the age of twenty-one months, by the spectacle of a doll that had lost its arms presumably had in it, along with a sense of something weirdly absurd in the mutilated form, a pretty keen sub-consciousness of dollish proprieties set at defiance. Other directions in the development of this early laughter at entertaining spectacles may be said to have their origin in the fun of play with its pretence or make-believe. Mrs. {215} Hogan’s boy, at the age of two years and two months, would laugh at his nurse’s pretended efforts to put on his shoes, which, instead of getting on, flew away wildly into freedom. This laughter was evoked at the fun of the thing, and probably involved an interpretation of the nurse’s action as play. Yet it had in it also, I think, the trace of an appreciation of the absurdity of the farcical collapse of effort. This is borne out by the fact that the boy, about the same time, would also laugh when the nurse, not in play, tried by jumping to hang a garment on a nail just too high for her. He may, of course, have regarded this, too, as but a continuation of the play. Yet it seems reasonable to suppose that the merry current had one of its sources in the perception of the amusing aspect of failure, of effort missing its mark and lapsing into nothingness.