THE BABY.

Timaru Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 1658, 11 January 1895, Page 3

THE BABY.

♦ Dr Louis Robertson, who has made the baby his special study, gives a humorous yet not improbably true explanation of the origin of the yelling infant, or as he puts it, perhaps after painful personal experience, "the astonishing vocal capabilities of the average baby." Nothing can account for this tremendous natural phenomenon, he thinks, but an hypothesis that parental duties were terribly neglected m primeval times, and that sharp coercive measures were necessary to keep our distant ancestors reminded of their obligation to their offspring. That any baby can squall for many hours at a stretch sufficiently loudly to make itself heard over a considerable area is a fact unfavourable to the domestic reputation of early man. It is plain from the universal distribution of this infantile gift, and from the indomitable perseverence with which it is exercised, that it has accomplished some useful purpose m ye,ars gone by. Babies must generally have got their own way m the end m the past, or they would not show such readiness nowadays to stake all they are worth m attempts to subdue everyone around them to abject serfdom.