m. Such children are apt to make great
mistakes in reasoning, from their registering of coincidences hastily;
they do not wait to repeat their experiments, but if they have in one
instance observed two things to happen at the same time, they expect
that they will always recur together. If one event precedes or follows
another accidentally, they believe it to be the cause or effect
of its concomitant, and this belief is not to be shaken in their
minds by ridicule or argument. They are, consequently, inclined
both to superstition and enthusiasm, according as their hopes
and fears predominate. They are likewise subject to absurd
antipathies--antipathies which verge towards insanity.

Dr. Darwin relates a strong instance of antipathy in a child from
association. The child, on tasting the gristle of sturgeon, asked what
gristle was? and was answered, that gristle was like the division of a
man's nose. The child, disgusted at this idea, for twenty years
afterwards could never be persuaded to taste sturgeon.[80]

Zimmermann assures us, that he was an eye-witness of a singular
antipathy, which we may be permitted to describe in his own words:

"Happening to be in company with some English gentlemen, all of them
men of distinction, the conversation fell upon antipathies. Many of
the company denied their reality, and considered them as idle stories,
but I assured them that they were truly a disease. Mr. William
Matthews, son to the governor of Barbadoes, was of my opinion, because
he himself had an antipathy to spiders. The rest of the company
laughed at him. I undertook to prove to them that this antipathy _was
really an impression on his soul, resulting from the determination of
a mechanical effect_. (We do not pretend to know what Dr. Zimmermann
means by this.) Lord John Murray undertook to shape some black wax
into the appearance of a spider, with a view to observe whether the
antipathy would take place at the simple figure of the insect. He then
withdrew for a moment, and came in again with the wax in his hand,
which he kept shut. Mr. Matthews, who in other respects was a very
amiable and moderate man, immediately conceiving that his friend
really had a spider in his hand, clapped his hand to his sword with
extreme fury, and running back towards the partition, cried out most
horribly. All the muscles of his face were swelled, his eyes were
rolling in their sockets, and his body was immoveable. We were all
exceedingly alar