Spalding took a brood of chickens, a week old, and while they were chirping around the hen in the meadow, he let fly a falcon. At once the chickens tried to hide in the grass and bushes, and the hen, that had always been kept shut up, so that she might have no experience of enemies, precipitated herself with such violence on the falcon on seeing it that she would certainly have killed it. Now neither she nor her first brood had ever seen a bird of prey. Spalding, in order to assure himself that it really is instinct which causes the recognition of enemies, had already let some pigeons fly, and these settled near the hen without producing any disturbance or emotion, as in the case of the falcon. We must therefore admit that there is an innate recollection which constitutes fear. II Philosophers, always dominated by a sublime idea of human faculties, have too much neglected the study of savages and children. And yet it is here that we ought to begin, if it is true that one must proceed from the simple to the complex. Physiologists seem, more than others, to have recognised this necessity, in order to distinguish inherited psychic facts from those which we are capable of acquiring by the experience of the senses. Let the physiologist remain long days at home with a sympathetic wife and a darling child, attentively observing and writing the whole life of the latter; this is for him the best, the ideal study. My colleague, Prof. Preyer, one of the most distinguished of embryologists, had this happy thought, and his book on the 'Soul of the Child’[29] is one of the most interesting volumes of modern psychology. [29] Preyer: _Die Seele des Kindes_. Jena, 1882. Even the first day after birth the face of the child changes suddenly if it is held towards the light from the window, or if its eyes are shaded by a hand. On the second day it shuts its eyes forcibly and immediately when a lighted candle is brought near to it, and draws its head back energetically if a light is held before its eyes on waking. In this case the child responds through excessive sensitiveness, not through fear. A child, a few months old, looking at the clouds or a snow-covered surface, closes its eyes oftener and more forcibly than an adult. During the first month children do not wink at a sudden noise, or when one makes a pretence of putting a finger into their eye. In Prof. Preyer’s child this movement appeared for the first time on the fifty-seventh day, and only from the sixtieth did it become regular and constant. We cannot think that a child, nine weeks old, can have any conception of danger, and that it closes its eyes and lifts its hands from fear. It was certainly not the result of experience, as we know that there had been no opportunity for it to learn the injurious nature of many things. Instead of entertaining the notion of fear, it seems more logical to consider these facts as analogous to the shutting of the eyes during the first hours of life.