The scientific study of infant intelligence ; a lecture / by Henry T. Blake.

  • Blake, Henry T. (Henry Taylor), 1828-1922
Date:
[1902], ©1902
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The scientific study of infant intelligence ; a lecture / by Henry T. Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    —18— sneezing, yawning, stretching, and of course sucking and screaming, were well performed by the infant. And M Perez asserts that infants in general make vague incoherent movements with their arms and legs, striking right and left without any definite object. M. Taine informs us that he succeeded in obtaining an excellent display of these move- ments by laying his subject on her face on a carpet in the garden, and that in this luxurious position she for hours at a time would work with all her limbs, uttering a multitude of different cries and exclamations consisting exclusively of vowel sounds. This went on, he says, for several months. Darwin improved on this experiment by tickling the sole of the infant's foot, which thereupon, he says, performed a jerk- ing movement accompanied by a curling of the toes; but Preyer was unable to achieve a similar success although he industriously inserted pins into various parts of the infant's person. It would appear however that this infant of Preyer's was a somewhat unfavorable subject for the experiment, as he had a habit of biting his own arms, fingers and tongue, pounding hard objects against his teeth and beating his own head with his fists. The Professor remarks that the child, while thus thumping its own head, seemed astonished at its hardness. This suggestion throws a ray of light upon its failure to respond to the stimulus of the pins, for it shows that its actions were not reflex but reflective; and it is probable that the pin experiment when carefully tried on a less con- templative infant will be a complete success. Much remains to be learned as to the cause and purposes of these mysterious movements, but the following lucid explanation by a writer in Mind of certain complex movements of his own infant and its reasons therefor, if correct, will go far to exonerate the race of infants from the charge of M. Perez that they move their arms and legs without any definite object. The writer says the purpose of the flexion of the thighs on the belly was probably partly to relieve the tension of the suddenly con- tracted abdominal muscles; but the movement of the arms (and partly those of the legs also) probably had for their cause the necessity for relief by a ' nervous discharge of great amplitude] otherwise called a sneeze. To clear up this sub-