ated the sacred laws of the Reading Room. I saw
one of the librarians make a sign to an attendant and point to me.

I gathered up my books quickly and returned them at the central desk. My
self-consciousness had returned, and I was anxious to be away from the
observation of the many dilettante readers who found my appearance more
engrossing than the books with which they were dallying on some pretext
or another.

Yet, curiously, when I reached the street, the theory which had come to
me in the Museum with the force and vividness of an illuminating dream
had lost some of its glamour. Nevertheless, I set it out as it then
shaped itself in my mind.

The great restraining force in the evolution of man, so I thought, has
been the restriction imposed by habit. What we call instinct is a
hereditary habit. This is the first guiding principle in the life of the
human infant. Upon this instinct we immediately superimpose the habits
of reason, all the bodily and intellectual conventions that have been
handed down from generation to generation. We learn everything we know
as children by the hereditary, simian habit of imitation. The child of
intellectual, cultured parents, born into savage surroundings, becomes
the slave of this inherited habit--call it tendency, if you will, the
intention is the same. I elaborated the theory by instance and
introspection, and found no flaw in it....

And here, by some freak of nature, was a child born without these
habits. During the period of gestation, one thought had dominated the
minds of both parents--the desire to have a son born without habits. It
does not seriously affect the theory that the desire had a peculiar end
in view; the wish, the urgent, controlling, omnipotent will had been
there, and the result included far more than the specific intention.

Already some of my distaste for the Stott child had vanished. It was
accountable, and therefore no longer fearful. The child was supernormal,
a cause of fear to the normal man, as all truly supernormal things are
to our primitive, animal instincts. This is the fear of the wild thing;
when we can explain and give reasons, the horror vanishes. We are men
again.

I did not quite recover the glow of my first inspiration, but the theory
remained with me; I decided to make a study of the child, to submit
knowledge to his reason. I would stand between him and the delimiting
training of the pedagogue, I thought.

Then I reached home, and my