THE BATTLE WITH FEARS (_Continued_). _The Assault of the Beasts._ There are two varieties of children's fears so prominent and so important that it seems worth while to deal with them separately. These are the dread of animals and of the dark. It may well seem strange that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are at first terribly put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. In some cases, no doubt, as when a child takes a strong dislike to a dog after having been alarmed at its barking, we have to do with the disturbing effect of sound merely. Fear here takes its rise in the experience of shock. In other cases we have to do rather with a sort of æsthetic dislike to what is disagreeable and ugly than with a true fear. Children sometimes appear to feel a repugnance to a black sheep or other animal just because they dislike black objects, though the feeling may not amount to fear properly so called. Yet allowing for these sources of repugnance, it seems probable that many children from about two or three onwards manifest something indistinguishable from fear at the first sight of certain animals. The directions of this childish fear vary greatly. Darwin's boy when taken to the Zoological Gardens at the age of two years three months showed a fear of the big caged animals whose forms were strange to him, such, _e.g._, as the lion and the tiger. Some children have shown fear on seeing a tame bear, others have selected the cow as their pet dread, others the butting ram, and so forth. Nor do they confine their aversions to the bigger animals. Snakes, caterpillars, worms, small birds such as sparrows, spiders and even moths have looked alarming enough to throw a child into a state of terror. It is sometimes thought that these early fears of animals are inherited from remote ancestors to whom many wild animals were really dangerous. But I do not think that this has been proven. The variety of these childish recoilings, and the fact that they seem to be just as often from small harmless creatures as from big and mighty ones, suggest that other causes are at work here. We may indeed suppose that a child's nervous system has been so put together and poised that it very readily responds to the impression of strange animal forms by a tremor. Special aspects of the unfamiliar animal, aided by special characteristics of its sounds, probably determine the directions of this tremor.