Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This fact of the special helplessness of the human offspring at birth, of its long period of dependence on parental or other aids—a period which, probably, tends to grow longer as civilisation advances—is rich in biological and sociological significance. For one thing, it presupposes a specially high development of the protective and foster¬ ing instincts in the human parents, and particularly the mother—for if the helpless wee thing were not met by these instincts, what would become of our race ? It is probable, too, as Mr. Spencer and others have argued, that the institution by nature of this condition of infantile weakness has reacted on the social affections of the race, helping to develop our pitifulness for all frail and helpless things. Nor is this all. The existence of the infant, with its large and imperative claims, has been a fact of capital importance in the development of social customs. Ethno¬ logical researches show that communities have been much exercised with the problem of infancy, have paid it the homage due to its supreme sacredness, girding it about with a whole group of protective and beneficent customs.1 Enough has been said, perhaps, to show the far-reaching significance of babyhood to the modern savant. It is hardly too much to say that it has become one of the most eloquent of nature’s phenomena, telling us at once of our affinity to the animal world, and of the forces by which our race has, little by little, lifted itself to so exalted a position above this world ; and so it has happened that not merely to the perennial baby-worshipper, the mother, and not merely to the poet touched with the mystery of far-off things, but to the grave man of science the infant has become a centre of lively interest. Nevertheless, it is not to the mere naturalist that the babe reveals all its significance. Physical organism as it seems to be more than anything else, hardly more than a 1 See, for example, the works of H. Ploss, Das Kind in Branch nnd Sitte, and Das kleine Kind,
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