See _The Pedagogical Seminary_, i., No. 2, p. 220. ----- In these cases we may suppose that we have to do with a germ of superstitious fear, which seems commonly to have its starting point in the appearance of something exceptional and uncanny, that is to say, unintelligible, and so smacking of the supernatural. The fear of feathers as uncanny objects plays, I am told, a considerable part in the superstitions of folk-lore. Such apparently self-caused movements, so suggestive of life, might easily give rise to a vague sense of a mysterious presence or power possessing the object, and so lead to a crude form of a belief in supernatural agents. In other cases of unexpected and mysterious movement the fear is slightly different. A little boy when one year and eleven months old was frightened when in a lady’s house by a toy elephant which shook its head. The same child, writes his mother, “at one year seven months was very much scared by a toy cow which mooed realistically when its head was moved. This cow was subsequently given to him, at about two years and three months. He was then still afraid of it, but became reconciled soon after, first allowing others to make it moo if he was at a safe distance, and at last making it moo himself.” There may have been a germ of the fear of animals here: but I suspect that it was mainly a feeling of uneasiness at the signs of life (movement and sound) appearing when they are not expected, and have an uncanny aspect. The close simulation of a living thing by what is known to be not alive is disturbing to the child as to the adult. He will make his toys alive by his own fancy, yet resent their taking on the full semblance of reality. In this sense he is a born idealist and not a realist. More careful observations on this curious group of child-fears are to be desired. The fear of shadows is closely related to that of moving toys. They are semblances, though horribly distorted semblances, and they are apt to move with an awful rapidity. The unearthly mounting shadows which accompany the child as he climbs the staircase at night have been instanced by writers as one of childhood’s freezing horrors. Mr. Stevenson writes:— Now my little heart goes beating like a drum, With the breath of the Bogie in my hair; And all round the candle the crooked shadows come, And go marching along up the stair; The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, The shadow of the child that goes to bed— All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp, With the black night overhead. I have noticed a young cat—the same that showed such terror at the playing of the piano—watch its own shadow rising on the wall, and, as I thought, with a look of apprehension. _The Fear of Animals._