In order to get fresh light on this subject, I have observed my own children carefully; but as I could not always know what nurses and maids might have said to them, the interpretation of the facts was often doubtful. So far as I could judge, they bore out Dr. Watson’s views as to fear in the first year of life. In the second year, they showed no fear of animals, except that one of them, for a time, was afraid of horses. This, however, was apparently due to the fact that a horse had suddenly galloped past her with a very loud noise. She is still in her second year, and therefore for later observation I am dependent on the boy. Near the end of his second year, he had a new nurse who was generally timid and especially afraid of the dark. He quickly acquired her terrors (of which we were ignorant at first); he fled from dogs and cats, cowered in abject fear before a dark cupboard, wanted lights in every part of the room after dark, and was even afraid of his little sister the first time he saw her, thinking, apparently, that she was a strange animal of some unknown species.[8] All these fears might have been acquired from the timid nurse; in fact they gradually faded away after she was gone. There were other fears, however, which could not be accounted for in the same way, since they began before the nurse came, and were directed to objects which no grown-up person would find alarming. Chief of these was a fear of everything that moved in a surprising way, notably shadows and mechanical toys. After making this observation, I learned that fears of this sort are normal in childhood, and that there are strong reasons for regarding them as instinctive. The matter is discussed by William Stern in his “Psychology of Early Childhood”, p. 494 ff, under the heading “Fear of the Mysterious”. What he says is as follows: