When, for example, we laugh at the spectacle of a child half hidden in his grandfather’s hat, what do we think of as degraded? Is it the child, the hat, or the absent grandfather? In such an instance can the idea of degradation properly be said to enter at all? So, likewise, it is difficult to conceive the presence of any idea either of degradation or superiority in the ringing laughter of a child at his puppy’s gambols or at the frisking of his kitten. And how explain on such a principle the laughter at non-malicious witticism? Appreciating the inapplicability of the Hobbesian doctrine in any form as explanatory of all sources of laughter, other investigators have emphasised the principle of contrast and incongruity, but to scarcely more satisfactory effect. “Laughter,” says Herbert Spencer, “naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small—when there is what we call a descending incongruity.” The manifest insufficiency of this theory is avoided in the more extensive one, to which Darwin inclines, defining the laughable as that which is queer, unusual, disagreeing with or contrary to our mental habits or the normal order of affairs. Assuredly there is almost always an element of queerness in the things at which we laugh. Yet it is also certain that the queer does not always make us laugh. As Camille Mélinaud has pointed out: “There are things contrary to the normal order that have nothing ludicrous about them; and if the view were true that queerness is the laughable element, those things that are strangest and most unusual should be the ones most certain by their very nature to excite laughter. But we do not laugh at the dancing horses, the jumping pigs, the musicians playing on bottles, of the circus, all of which are most contradictory of what we are accustomed to. If we laugh at the circus, it is at the accessory jokes and incidents in the detail. A conjurer’s tricks, seemingly contradictory as they are of all our experiences and notions, do not make us laugh. We laugh at his jokes and his funny ways of proceeding, but we wonder at his tricks.” (_Popular Science Monthly_, vol. liii, p. 398.) Mélinaud’s own view, oddly enough, is about as unconvincing as any that has ever been formulated, for, while laying stress on the principle of incongruity, he insists that laughter comes only when the laugher, “by a rapid process of thought,” submits the object of his mirth to a reflective analysis and arrives at the laugh-provoking conclusion that what seems absurd is really quite natural from the point of view of the person or thing laughed at. Then, and not until then, do we feel amused. On such a theory one might well wonder that children ever find it possible to laugh, and that laughter is so prevalent among adults who are not accustomed to any very high degree of logical thinking.