Most people were they asked at what moment the child’s mind first began to register feelings, thoughts, and emotions, would probably at once and without hesitation say, “At the moment of birth.” It seems the obvious thing to say, but like many other obvious things such a statement appears to have but little evidence in support of it and much against it. The act of birth has performed no sudden or miraculous change upon the growth and tissues of the body. It is true that oxygen is now absorbed through the lungs instead of as originally through the mother’s blood, but the essential tissues, the brain, the muscles and the bones have undergone no sudden change. Before birth, they were living tissues, and we know that the muscles were at work, for we had felt the baby’s movements _in utero_; we know that the heart was at work, driving the blood through the child’s arteries. We had learnt this also by means of the stethoscope many weeks before the child was born. Why then should we assume that the brain had registered nothing at birth? We do indeed know that it must have been at work in part, for it was learning to regulate the action of the child’s heart and the child’s secretions, the blood pressure, and the motions of its limbs. We are therefore justified in assuming that it must be capable of registering impressions, even though it were incapable of reason or thought. It is true that at birth it commences to undergo many vivid new experiences, but that is no reason for assuming that it has not undergone any experiences _in utero_, and that these experiences have not made some impressions on the brain. Let us see for a moment what impressions it is likely to have received and registered. First of all, it would most certainly hear sounds, the sounds of the blood rushing through the mother’s arteries and the sounds from the outer world, muffled and indistinct when they had penetrated the mother’s body. All these sounds would be of a soft crooning nature, and those caused by the blood in the mother’s arteries would be of a rhythmic, humming, rising and falling nature, a kind of rhythmic lullaby very similar in many respects to the lullaby the mother will hum to the child when she wishes to put it to sleep at a later period. We should expect these sounds to be registered on the child’s brain so that if it ever heard their like again, some chord of _feeling-memory_ would be struck, and some emotional association brought to mind. In the second place, external movements would be registered on the child’s mind as the mother walked about. There would be a swaying or swinging movement. Again we should expect that when, in after life, the child experienced a swaying or swinging movement, a chord of memory would be touched again, and these earlier associations would be revived; not as a conscious memory or fact, of course, but as a feeling.