Consider for a moment the natural prejudice which the inquirer into the characteristics of the infant has to face. Such inquiry is not merely passively watching what spontaneously presents itself; it is emphatically experimenting, that is, the calling out of reactions by applying appropriate stimuli. Even to try whether the new-born babe will close its fingers on your finger when brought into contact with their anterior surface may well seem impious to a properly constituted nurse. To propose to test the wee creature’s sense of taste by applying drops of various solutions, as acid, bitters, etc., to the tongue, or to provoke ocular movements to the right or the left, would pretty certainly seem a profanation of the temple of infancy, if not fraught with danger to its tiny deity. And as to trying Dr. Robinson’s experiment of getting the newly arrived visitor to suspend his whole precious weight by clasping a bar, it is pretty certain that, women being constituted as at present, only a medical man could have dreamt of so daring a feat. There is no doubt that baby-worship, the sentimental adoration of infant ways, is highly inimical to the carrying out of a perfectly cool and impartial process of scientific observation. Hence the average mother can hardly be expected to do more than barely to tolerate this encroaching of experiment into the hallowed retreat of the nursery. Even in these days of rapid modification of what used to be thought unalterable sexual characters, one may be bold enough to hazard the prophecy that women who have had scientific training will, if they happen to become mothers, hardly be disposed to give their minds at the very outset to the rather complex and difficult work, say, of making an accurate scientific inventory of the several modes of infantile sensibility, visual, auditory, and so forth, and of the alterations in these from day to day. It is for the coarser fibred man, then, to undertake much of the earlier experimental work in the investigation of child-nature. And if fathers will duly qualify themselves they will probably find that permission will little by little be given them to carry out investigations, short, of course, of anything that looks distinctly dangerous to the little being’s comfort.