The close connexion between æsthetic dislike and fear is seen in the well-marked recoilings of children from odd uncanny-looking dolls. The girl M., when just over six months old, was frightened at a Japanese doll so that it had to be put in another room. Another child when thirteen months old was terrified at the sight of an ugly doll. The said doll is described as black with woolly head, startled eyes, and red lips. Such an ogre might well call up a tremor in the bravest of children. In another case, that of a little boy of two years and two months, the broken face of a doll proved to be highly disconcerting. The mother describes the effect as mixed of fear, distress, and intellectual wonder. Nor did his anxiety depart when some hours later the doll, after sleeping in his mother’s room, reappeared with a new face. In such cases, it seems plain, it is the ugly transformation of something specially familiar and agreeable which excites the feeling of nervous apprehension. Making grimaces, that is the spoiling of the typical familiar face, may, it is said, disturb a child even at the early age of two months.[141] It is much the same when the child M., at the age of thirteen months three weeks, was frightened and howled when a lady looked at her close with blue spectacles, though she was quite used to ordinary glasses. Such transformations of the homely and assuring face are, moreover, not only ugly but bewildering to the child, and where all is mysterious and uncanny the child is apt to fear. Whether “inherited associations” involving a dim recognition of the _meaning_ of these distortions play any part here I do not feel at all certain. ----- Footnote 141: Quoted by Tracy, _op. cit._, p. 29. But this observation seems to me to need confirmation. ----- Children, like animals, will sometimes show fear at the sight of what seems to us a quite harmless object. A shying horse is a puzzle to his rider: his terrors are so unpredictable. Similarly in the case of a timid child almost anything unfamiliar and out of the way, whether in the colour, the form, or the movement of an object, may provoke a measure of anxiety. Thus a little girl, aged one year and ten months, showed signs of fear during a drive at a row of grey ash trees placed along the road. This was just the kind of thing that a horse might shy at. As with animals, so with children, any seemingly uncaused movement is apt to excite a feeling of alarm. Just as a dog will run away from a leaf whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be terrified by the strange and quite irregular behaviour of a feather as it glides along the floor or lifts itself into the air. A little girl of three, standing by the bedside of her mother (who was ill at the time), was so frightened at the sight of a feather, which she accidentally pulled out of the eiderdown quilt, floating in the air that she would not approach the bed for days afterwards.[142] ----- Footnote 142: