It is worth noting that animals show a similar dread of musical sounds. I took a young cat of about eight weeks in my lap and struck some chords not loudly on the piano. It got up, moved uneasily from side to side, then bolted to the corner of the room and seemed to try to get up the walls. Dogs, too, certainly seem to be put out, if not to experience fear, at the music of a brass band. It is sometimes supposed that this startling effect of loud sounds is wholly an affair of nervous disturbance:[133] but the late development of the repugnance in certain cases seems to show that this is not the only cause at work. Of course a child’s nervous organisation may through ill health become more sensitive to this disturbing effect; and, as the life of Chopin tells us, the delicate organisation of a future musician may be specially subject to these shocks. Yet I suspect that vague alarm at the unexpected and unknown takes part here. There is something uncanny to the child in the very production of sound from a silent thing. A banjo lying now inert, harmless, and then suddenly firing off a whole gamut of sound may well shock a small child’s preconceptions of things. The second time that fear was observed in one child at the age of ten months, it was excited by a new toy which squeaked on being pressed.[134] This seems to be another example of the disconcerting effect of the unexpected. In other cases the alarming effect of the mystery is increased by the absence of all visible cause. One little boy of two years used to get sadly frightened at the sound of the water rushing into the cistern which was near his nursery. The child was afraid at the same time of thunder, calling it ‘water coming’. ----- Footnote 133: This seems to be the view of Perez: _The First Three Years of Childhood_ (English translation), p. 64. Footnote 134: Observation of F. H. Champneys, _Mind_, vol. vi., p. 106. ----- I am far from saying that all children manifest this fear of sounds. Miss Shinn points out that her niece was from the first pleased with the piano, and this is no doubt true of many children. Children behave very differently towards thunder, some being greatly disturbed by it, others being rather delighted. Thus Preyer’s boy, who was so ignominiously upset by the tone of the drinking-glass, laughed at the thunderstorm; and we know that the little Walter Scott was once found during a thunderstorm lying on his back in the open air clapping his hands and shouting “Bonnie, bonnie!” at the flashes of lightning. It is possible that in such cases the exhilarating effect of the brightness counteracts the uncanny effect of the thunder. More observations are needed on this point.