The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1896-10-14
Scientific Appliances in the Rear
ing Of Infants.
TWO PSYCHOLOGISTS BABIES.
Children Taught Muscular Coordination and
Self Preservation from Birth-The Study Of
Colors-The Touch is Developed in Baby
hood Are Interesting Study For All.
Boston Transcript

scientists are rearing their babies ac-
cording TO unique, scientific methods,
to the like of which no children in the
world have ever been subjected. The
savants in question are Psycho-phy-
sicist Elmer Gates, director of the new
laboratory of psychology and mind art,
and Mr.. William Dinwiddle, the gov
ernment's photographer. Hear
ing of the experiments in an incidental
way, the writer recently visited the
two gentlemen at their laboratories
and persuaded them to divulge the de-
tails of their methods which have never
before been made public.
Professor Gates is an experimenter
in the new science of psycho-physics,
and is arranging in the suburbs of this
city an elaborate laboratory in which
he is installing many a complicated
apparatus for measuring and altering
the sensations and emotions of man.
His only child, to whom the writer was
presented, is a happy-faced and pretty
boy of sixteen months, whose blue eyes
shine brighter than those of most chill
dren and whose well-formed head, en-
wreathed in golden curIs, is unusually
developed for an infant of his size.
The unique course of training which
he has daily undergone since he ap-
peared in this world has been system
aticalIy devised to serve in substitution
for the usual processes of amusement
ton. His play things are the delicate
instruments of his fathers laboratory,
and he enjoys as much fun with this
odd apparatus as the average youngster
horse.
Baby Gates father told the writer,
in the beginning of the interview,
which took place partly at his labora-
tory and partly at his adjacent resi-
dence, that his oiginal theories relat-
ing to scientific child rearing have
been based upon numerous expert
ments which he has for a number of
years made with animals, such as dogs,
guinea pigs, mice, and others. These
animals have had their brains trained
by different processes which he applies
to man, now that he has seen their
exact effects. A man who can't train
a dumb beast, this eXperimenter said,
is unfit to train a young infant. 1t is
T1aY in In tn In
ject children to any experimental pro-
cesses whose exact effects have not
first been accurately determined by
scientific investigation.
Baby Gates training, according to
the father, began about two years be-
fore he was born. In the psychologist
opinion. the mental, moral and physi-
cal developments of child are pro-
foundry modified by the intellectual and
emotional life as we'll as by the health
of both parents during, period pre-
ceding its creation. He says that some
modern biologists believe that charac-
tiers acquired by parents during theil
own lives cannot be transmitted direct
" to their children. To contradict this
he lately trained guinea pigs for foul
successive generations in the use OF
their seeing faculties, and he found thai
the young of the fourth generation
were born with much greater number
of cells in the seeing areas OF then
brains than were found in the brains
of other guinea pigs which he had not
trained.
The complicated processes by which
the Gates baby is trained are based
IL, - = 2 h
senses, which the psychologist has de-
vised after studying all of the class OF
nerves. According TO this we have
eight senses, instead of FIVE, as was
taught to us at school. These senses
are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch
sense of cold, sense of heat, and the
muscular sense.
Soon after his baby was born the
psychologist began as the first training
to develop the brain cells controlling
his senses of heat and cold. Each day
he was placed in a tub of water whose
temperature could be varied to any
degree. At first a single bath was
given in water having the normal tenn
perature of his body. At the end OF sl1
weeks two additional baths were given
one slightly warmer and one slight!
cooler. The baby was placed first il
the cool, then in the normal, and last
in the warm water. The limits of the
temperatures of the cool and warm
water were more exaggerated from
week to week by adding more baths
And thus has the infant been trained
10 endure considerably high and low
temperatures by gradual but not sud
den changes. A device for developing
the acuteness of the child's heat ant
cold senses is a pair of rubber gloves
connected with both warm and colo
water supply. These are daily rubbed