“Its first act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then long, thin, tearless _á--á_, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic, but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red, shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged, it is not strange that, if the mother has not followed Froebel’s exhortations and come to love her child before birth, there is a brief interval occasionally dangerous to the child before the maternal instinct is fully aroused.” It cannot be denied that this unflattering description is fair enough, and our baby was no handsomer than the rest of her kind. The little boy uncle, who had been elated to hear that his niece resembled him, looked shocked and mortified when he saw her. Yet she did not lack admirers. I have never noticed that women (even those who are not mothers) mind a few little æsthetic defects, such as these that President Hall mentions, with so many counterbalancing charms in the little warm, soft, living thing. Nor is it women only who find the new baby enchanting--in Germany, at least. Semmig, whose “Tagebuch eines Vaters” is one of the earliest attempts at a record, is delighted even with the “dismal and monotonous cry.” “Heavenly music of the first cry!” he exclaims, “sacred voice of life, first sound of the poem of a heart, first note of the symphony of human life, thou echo of God’s word! What sound is like unto thee?” “Yes, it is so: the cry of the baby is music! When it is still, especially in the night, one is uneasy; one longs for this primitive expression of the little being, and is consoled, enraptured, when the helpless creature breaks into loud wails, and says to us: I live, give me what I need! Oh, cry of the baby in the night, nightingale song for mother and father!” Our baby was at least a handsome one from the doctor’s point of view, strong, healthy, and well formed; and this is to be taken into account as a determining factor in all the record that follows. I thought that she must be out of the normal in the matter of legs, so oddly brief were the fat little members. Afterward I learned that all babies are built that way--and indeed that they are altogether so different in structure from the grown man that Dr. Oppenheim, in his book on “The Development of the Child,” comes near to saying that we must regard the infant as a different animal form from the adult, almost as the caterpillar is different from the butterfly. Common speech recognizes this in the case of several of the higher animals, naming the young form as differently as if it were a different species. We say a colt, a calf, a puppy, a baby; not a young horse, cow, dog, or man.