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If the doctor is to fit himself to give advice of this sort, he must be a close observer of little children. He must not consider it beneath his dignity to study nursery life and nursery ways. There he will find the very beginnings of things, the growing point, as it were, of all neuropathy. A man of fifty, who in many other ways showed evidence of a highly nervous temperament, had especially one well-marked phobia, the fear of falling downstairs. It had never been absent all his life, and he had grown used to making the descent of the stairs clinging firmly to the stair-rail. Family tradition assigned this infirmity to a fall downstairs in early childhood. But all children fall downstairs and are none the worse. The persistence of the fear was due, I make no doubt, to the attitude of the parents or nurse, who made much of the accident, impressed the occasion strongly on the child's memory, and surrounded him thereafter with precautions which sapped his confidence and fanned his fears.