I confess to have been surprised at what looks like the precocity of some children in the matter of honouring the proprieties of conduct. The little girl M., when only fourteen months old, is said to have laughed in an “absurdly conscious way” at a small boy who stood by her perambulator asking for a kiss. That kiss, we are told, was not forthcoming. Was the laugh merely an incident in a mood of nervous shyness, or did it signify a dim perception of “bad form” on the part of the proposer? Much care is needed in the interpretation of such expressive reactions. A small boy of eighteen months laughed when his pants slipped down. But this may only have resulted from a sense of the fun of the irregularity of the proceeding, aided perhaps by others’ amusement. A true feeling of shame is, of course, not developed at this age; yet a child may have caught from instruction a feeling of the shocking impropriety of an ill-timed casting aside of the clothes-trammels. {216} We may find in the laughter of the child, within the period of the first three years, pretty clear indications of the development of a rude perception of amusing incongruities in dress and behaviour. The young eye has a keen outlook for the proprieties in the matter of clothes. Ruth, who was in the thirteenth month amused at seeing her new mittens put on, showed amusement about the same date when her pink bonnet was put on her aunt’s head. In this case, the play-significance of the action for the child’s consciousness is apparent. It seems fairly certain, indeed, that this higher form of a recognition of the laughable grows out of the play-interpretation. When at play children not only throw off rules of decorum and do improper things, they put aside ideas of appropriateness and launch out into bizarre discontinuities and contrarieties of action and speech. The play-attitude, as lawless and free, tends to inconsequence. Hence the readiness with which a child interprets such inconsequences as play. It is the same when a child laughs at droll stories of the doings of animals and persons. He may take fables and other fancies seriously enough at times, but if his mind is pitched for merriment, he will greatly appreciate the extravagant unsuitabilities of behaviour of the heroes of his nursery books. The little girl M., when two years seven months old, laughed gaily at a passage in a story about kittens, in which they are made to say, “Waiter, this cat’s meat is tough;” asking in the midst of her merriment, “Did you ever saw such funny tits?”