discussion between mother and doctor, repeated it may be more than
once, may be necessary before the truth is arrived at, and a line of
action decided upon. Only so can the doctor, remote as he is from the
environment of the child, intervene to mould its nature and shape its
conduct.

If the doctor is to fit himself to give advice of this sort, he must
be a close observer of little children. He must not consider it
beneath his dignity to study nursery life and nursery ways. There he
will find the very beginnings of things, the growing point, as it
were, of all neuropathy. A man of fifty, who in many other ways showed
evidence of a highly nervous temperament, had especially one
well-marked phobia, the fear of falling downstairs. It had never been
absent all his life, and he had grown used to making the descent of
the stairs clinging firmly to the stair-rail. Family tradition
assigned this infirmity to a fall downstairs in early childhood. But
all children fall downstairs and are none the worse. The persistence
of the fear was due, I make no doubt, to the attitude of the parents
or nurse, who made much of the accident, impressed the occasion
strongly on the child's memory, and surrounded him thereafter with
precautions which sapped his confidence and fanned his fears.

In what follows we will consider first the subject of nursery
management, searching in it for the origin of the common disorders of
conduct both of childhood and of later life. I have grouped these
nursery observations under the heads of four characteristic features
of the child's psychology--his Imitativeness, his Suggestibility, his
Love of Power, and his acute though limited Reasoning Faculties. I
feel that some such brief examination is necessary if we are to
understand correctly the ætiology of some of the most troublesome