“First I began to drum the march; then, profiting by some notes common to both, I passed to the quicker and more staccato notes of my friend’s favourite air. P—— on his part suddenly changed the air, and began to whistle ‘Madame Angot.’ Every one burst out laughing. My friend was too absorbed in a check to the queen to notice anything. “‘Let us begin again,’ said I, ‘and go back to “Le Prophète.”’ And straightway we had Meyerbeer once more, with a special fugue. My friend knew that he had whistled something, but that was all he knew.” Here, obviously, we have on the part of the man accepting and acting on the idea suggested to him, a temporary suspension of the critical faculty. Had he been on the alert, had he been aware of Professor Ochorowitz’s intention, he would never have followed the lead thus given, refraining from doing so if only from fear of appearing ridiculous. This element of uncritical, automatic acceptance is fundamental in suggestion, and it is this that makes suggestion such a tremendously important factor in the life of the young. The child, it has often been said, is the most imitative of beings. This is only another way of saying that childhood is the most suggestible period of life. Precisely because the critical faculty is then undeveloped the child readily accepts and translates into some form of action the suggestions impinging on his mind from the external world. Necessarily some impressions are experienced by him more frequently than others, and by the very fact of repetition these tend to induce in him a more or less fixed mode of reaction. Thus, without the slightest awareness, he acquires good or bad “habits” of thinking and acting, and displays moods and tendencies which, often regarded by parents as quite inexplicable, are the logical and inevitable product of suggestions with which he has been bombarded since his life began. In this way are to be explained many personal characteristics often mistakenly attributed to the influence of heredity. If a man is a “grouch,” and his young son also displays unmistakable signs of grouchiness, it would indeed be rash to jump to the conclusion that the son had been born grouchy. It may well be—the chances are, it is—that he has acquired a grouchy turn of mind simply through imitation of his father’s habitual attitude. “A little girl only fifteen months old,” to quote one observation by that careful student of child life, B. Perez, “had already begun to imitate her father’s frowns and irritable ways and angry voice, and very soon after she learned to use his expressions of anger and impatience. When three years old this child gravely said to a visitor, with whom she argued quite in her father’s style, ‘Do be quiet, will you? You never let me finish my sentences.’”