I have purposely reserved for special discussion two varieties of children’s fear, namely, dread of animals and of the dark. As the former certainly manifests itself before the latter I will take it first. It seems odd that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the scene. Yet so it is. Many children, at least, are at first put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. We must, however, be careful here in distinguishing between mere nerve-shock and dislike on the one hand and genuine fear on the other. Thus a lady whom I know, a good observer, tells me that her boy, though when he was fifteen months old his nerves were shaken by the loud barking of a dog, had no real fear of dogs. With this may be contrasted another case, also sent by a good observer, in which it is specially noted that the aversion to the sound of a dog’s barking developed late and was a true fear. Æsthetic dislikes, again, may easily give rise to quasi-fears, though, as we all know, little children have not the horrors of their elders in this respect. The boy C. could not understand his mother’s scare at the descending caterpillar. A kind of æsthetic dislike appears to show itself sometimes towards animals of peculiar shape and colour. A black animal, as a sheep or a cow, seems more particularly to come in for these childish aversions. At first it seems impossible to understand why a child in the fourteenth week should shrink from a cat.[143] This is not, so far as I can gather, a common occurrence at this age, and one would like to cross-examine the mother on the precise way in which the child had its first introduction to the domestic pet. So far as one can speculate on the matter, one would say that such early shrinking from animals is probably due to their sudden unexpected movements, which may well disconcert the inexperienced infant accustomed to comparatively restful surroundings. ----- Footnote 143: Quoted by Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 127. The word he uses is “scheuen”. ----- This seems borne out by another instance, also quoted by Preyer, of a girl who in the fourth month, as also in the eleventh, was so afraid of pigeons that she could not bring herself to stroke them. The prettiness of the pigeon, if not of the cat, ought, one supposes, to ensure the liking of children; and one has to fall back on the supposition of the first disconcerting strangeness of the moving animal world for the child’s mind.