Excerpt from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 47: May to October, 1895 Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children being decidedly more sociable toward strangers than others. It would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take kindly to strangers. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition occurs at very different dates in the case of different children. I should like to add that the little boy to whom I referred just now displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends after an interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old he moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came home after a fortnight's holiday. Here, however, the signs of fear seem to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan. Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure of this same mental uneasiness. C - 's disturbance at the age of twelve weeks at finding his mother in a new dress is paralleled by the apprehensions of Preyer's boy when one year and five months old on seeing his mother in a black dress. The second observation, read in the light of the first, seems to suggest that a change from the customary rather than anything appalling looking in the black color itself was here the source of the boy's trouble.* This is borne out by another observation sent me. A child manifested between the ages of six or eight months and two years and a half the most marked repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new apparel disturbed too rudely the child's sense of his proper self, and begot an uncanny feeling of another put in place of the old familiar child. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.