Children Who Run on All Fours and Other Animal-Like Behaviors in the Human Child.

Abstract

Human babies are little animals. Some of them are more like little nonhuman animals than others. Professor Hrdlička is convinced that children who show, for a shorter or longer time, such reminiscent phenomena of an earlier stage as quadruped locomotion are not the feebleminded or feeble-bodied but the physically and mentally superiors. The first section of this book is devoted to descriptions of children who run on all fours and the analysis of the nature of this performance. The next chapters concern the mentality of the children, with such related phenomena as phobias, abnormal tastes, head banging and thumb sucking. The author then considers other animal-like manifestations, the problems of the colored children, strange postures and methods of locomotion and the causes of animal-like manifestations. The habit of walking on all fours appears to be more common in boys than in girls and in the first child of the family