THE BIOGRAPHY
  OF
  A BABY

  BY
  MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge




  COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED
  IN THE U. S. A.




  CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE

     I. BABY BIOGRAPHIES IN GENERAL                                    1

    II. THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENTS                    20

   III. THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS               39

    IV. THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS                                     58

     V. BEGINNINGS OF EMOTION AND PROGRESS IN SENSE POWERS            78

    VI. PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING                                      99

   VII. SHE LEARNS TO GRASP, AND DISCOVERS THE WORLD OF THINGS       118

  VIII. THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS                                   141

    IX. THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE                                     161

     X. BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION                                     182

    XI. CREEPING AND STANDING                                        203

   XII. RUDIMENTS OF SPEECH; CLIMBING AND PROGRESS TOWARD WALKING    224

  XIII. WALKING ALONE; DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE                       238




THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BABY




I

BABY BIOGRAPHIES IN GENERAL


“It is a well recognized fact in the history of science that the very
subjects which concern our dearest interests, which lie nearest our
hearts, are exactly those which are the last to submit to scientific
methods, to be reduced to scientific law. Thus it has come to pass
that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and while
the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with the
keenest interest and intensest joy by intelligent and even scientific
fathers and mothers from time immemorial, yet very little has yet been
done in the scientific study of this most important of all possible
subjects--the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the human mind.

“Only in the last few years has scientific attention been drawn to the
subject at all. Its transcendent importance has already enlisted many
observers, but on account of the great complexity of the phenomena, and
still more the intrinsic difficulty of their interpretation, scientific
progress has scarcely yet commenced.

“What is wanted most of all in this, as in every science, is _a body
of carefully observed facts_. But to be an accomplished investigator
in this field requires a rare combination of qualities. There must be
a wide intelligence combined with patience in observing and honesty
in recording. There must be also an earnest scientific spirit,
a loving sympathy with the subject of investigation, yet under
watchful restraint, lest it cloud the judgment; keenness of intuitive
perception, yet soberness of judgment in interpretation.”

I have appropriated these words of Dr. Joseph Le Conte because the
general reader is not likely to see them where they were originally
printed, in a little university study, and it is a pity to let the
general reader miss so good an introduction to the subject. Not all
learned men rate baby biography as highly as Dr. Le Conte does; but
probably all biologists do, and those psychologists who are most
strongly impressed with the evolutionary interpretation of life.

It is easy to see why one’s views of evolution affect the matter.
In botany, for instance, we do not think that we can understand the
mature plant by studying it alone, without knowledge of its germinating
period. If we omitted all study of radicle and plumule and cotyledon,
we should not only lose an interesting chapter from the science, but
even the part we kept, the classification and morphology and physiology
of the grown plant itself, would be seriously misunderstood in some
ways. So in other sciences: it is necessary to understand how things
came to be what they are, to study the _process of becoming_, so to
speak, before the completed result can be understood. This is what we
mean by “the genetic method” of studying a subject.

Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human mind
unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will feel
the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in our
grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single complete,
inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so fused together
by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We know that this is
the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance at a ball, and see
its form with a single act of mind. Yet that act became possible only
after long drill in putting simpler perceptions together. Many a test
of form, turning objects over and over, passing the hands round and
round them, learning the absence of corners, the equality of diameters,
did we go through in babyhood, many an inspection by eye, many an
exercise of memory, connecting the peculiar arrangement of light and
shade with the form as felt, before we could “see” a ball. Had this
been understood in Froebel’s time, it would have made a material
difference in his suggestions as to sense training in earliest infancy.
So other powers that seem simple and inborn may perhaps be detected in
the act of forming themselves out of simpler ones, if we watch babies
closely enough, and it may lead us to revise some of our theories about
education.

There are enthusiasts, indeed, who would have us believe that child
study is going to revolutionize all our educational methods, but
those who are surest of these wonderful results, and readiest to
tell mothers and teachers what is the truly scientific thing to do
with their children, are not the ones who have done the most serious
first hand study of children. From indications so far, it is likely
that the outcome of such study will oftener be to confirm some good
old-fashioned ways of training (showing that they rested unconsciously
on a sound psychological basis) than to discover new ways. No
substitute has yet been found by scientific pedagogy for motherly good
sense and devotion.

Yet the direct study of child minds does bring out some new suggestions
of educational value, does give a verdict sometimes between old
conflicting theories, and always makes us understand more clearly what
we are doing with children. And on the purely scientific side there
is one aspect of especial interest in genetic studies. That is, the
possible light we may get on the past of the human race.

It has long been observed that there are curious resemblances between
babies and monkeys, between boys and barbaric tribes. Schoolboys
administer law among themselves much as a tribal court does; babies
sit like monkeys, with the soles of their little feet facing each
other. Such resemblances led, long before the age of Darwin, to the
speculation that children in developing passed through stages similar
to those the race had passed through; and the speculation has become an
accepted doctrine since embryology has shown how each individual before
birth passes in successive stages through the lower forms of life.

This series of changes in the individual is called by evolutionists the
Ontogenic Series; and the similar series through which the race has
passed in the myriads of ages of its evolution is called the Phylogenic.

Now, of these two versions of the great world history, the phylogenic
is a worn and ancient volume, mutilated in many places, and often
illegible. The most interesting chapter of all is torn out--that which
records the passing over of man from brute to human, the beginning of
true human reason, speech, and skill. The lowest living races are far
beyond the transition line; the remains of the past can never tell us
how it was crossed, for before man could leave anything more than
bones--any products of his art, such as weapons, or signs of fire--he
had traveled a long way from his first human condition.

But from the ontogenic record no chapter can be torn out: a fresh copy
of the whole history, from alpha to omega, is written out every time
an infant is conceived, and born, and grows to manhood. And somewhere
on the way between the first cell of the embryo and maturity each
one must repeat in his own life that wonderful transition into human
intelligence. If we can thoroughly decipher tills ontogenic record,
then, what may we not hope to learn of the road by which we human
beings came?

We must not forget that the correspondence between these life books
is only a rough one. They are versions of the same world story, but
they have traveled far from their common origin, and have become
widely unlike in details. The baby has to take many short cuts, and
condense and omit inconceivably, to get through in a few brief years a
development that the race took ages for. Even the order of development
gets disarranged sometimes. For instance, primitive man probably
reached a higher development before he could talk than babies have
to now, after ages of talking ancestry: we must not look to a child
just learning to talk, to get an idea of what the minds of men were
like when _they_ were just learning to talk. Again, the human child is
carrying on under the influence of adults an evolution that primitive
man worked out without help or hindrance from any one wiser than
himself; and that makes a great difference in the way he does it.

The moral of all this is that people should be very cautious indeed
in drawing parallels between the child and the race, and especially
in basing educational theories on them. But if one is cautious enough
and patient enough, there are many hints about our race history to be
found in every nursery. Some of these I shall relate in the following
chapters.

       *       *       *       *       *

Most studies of children deal with later childhood, the school years;
and these are almost always statistical in their method, taking the
individual child very little into account. My own study has been
of babyhood, and its method has been biographical. It is hard to
get statistics about babies, scattered as they are, one by one, in
different homes, not massed in schoolrooms. Now and then a doctor has
found material for good comparative investigations, and much effort has
been spent in trying to gather up measurements of babies’ growth; but
on the whole the most fruitful method so far has been the biographical
one--that of watching one baby’s development, day by day, and recording
it.

I am often asked if the results one gets in this way are not
misleading, since each child might differ greatly from others. One
must, of course, use great caution in drawing general conclusions
from a single child, but in many things all babies are alike, and one
learns to perceive pretty well which are the things. Babyhood is mainly
taken up with the development of the large, general racial powers;
individual differences are less important than in later childhood. And
the biographical method of child study has the inestimable advantage of
showing the process of evolution going on, the actual unfolding of one
stage out of another, and the steps by which the changes come about. No
amount of comparative statistics could give this. If I should find out
that a thousand babies learned to stand at an average age of forty-six
weeks and two days, I should not know as much that is important about
standing, as a stage in human progress, as I should after watching a
single baby carefully through the whole process of achieving balance on
his little soles.

Yet there are not many baby biographies in existence. There are
scarcely half a dozen records that are full and consecutive enough
to be at all entitled to the name, and even of more fragmentary ones
the number in print as separate essays is scarcely larger. A good
many more, however, have been available in manuscript to students,
and many mothers no doubt keep such little notebooks. These notes are
often highly exact and intelligent, as far as they go (I have found
this especially true of the notebooks of members of the Association of
Collegiate Alumnæ), and afford important corroborations here and there
to more continuous records.

It was the Germans who first thought baby life worth recording, and the
most complete and scientific of all the records is a German one. The
first record known was published in the last century by a Professor
Tiedemann--a mere slip of an essay, long completely forgotten, but
resuscitated about the middle of this century, translated into French
(and lately into English), and used by all students of the subject.
Some of its observations we must, with our present knowledge, set
down as erroneous; but it is on the whole exact and valuable, and a
remarkable thing for a man to have done more than a hundred years ago.

Perhaps Darwin, in 1840, was the next person to take notes of an
infant’s development; but they were taken only incidentally to another
study, and were not published for more than thirty years (partly in
“The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1873, partly in
a magazine article in 1877). They are scanty but important. In the
interval before they were published two or three small records had been
published in Germany, and at least one paper, that of M. Taine, in
France.

In 1881, the first edition of Professor Preyer’s “model record” was
published, and before his death, in 1897, it had reached its third
edition in Germany, and had been widely circulated in America in Mr.
Brown’s excellent translation, “The Senses and the Will,” and “The
Development of the Intellect.” It did more to stimulate and direct
the study of infancy than any other publication. It has, however, the
limitations that were to be expected from Professor Preyer’s special
training as a physiologist, and is meagre on the side of mental, moral,
and emotional development. Professor Sully’s “Extracts from a Father’s
Diary,” published in part in 1881 and 1884 and fully in 1896, is richer
on these sides, and also more readable.

Within the present decade, it is worth observing, the principal records
have been American, not German, and have been written by women. Outside
of America, only men, usually university professors, have made extended
records. Professor Preyer and Professor Sully have both appealed in
vain to their countrywomen to keep such records, holding up American
women for emulation. My “Notes on the Development of a Child” were
published in 1893 and 1899. In 1896 appeared Mrs. Hall’s “The First
500 Days of a Child’s Life,” a brief record, and confined to a short
period, but a very good one, and perhaps the best for use as a guide
by any one who wishes to keep a record and finds Preyer too technical.
Mrs. Moore’s “Mental Development of a Child” is quite as much a
psychological study as a record, but is based on full biographical
notes; it will be more used by students than general readers. Mrs.
Hogan’s “A Study of a Child,” 1898, is less scholarly than the others,
but has a great deal of useful material; it does not begin at birth,
however, but with the fourteenth month.

Perhaps I should say a word here as to the way in which I came to make
a baby biography, for I am often asked how one should go to work at it.
It was not done in my case for any scientific purpose, for I did not
feel competent to make observations of scientific value. But I had for
years desired an opportunity to see the wonderful unfolding of human
powers out of the limp helplessness of the new-born baby; to watch this
fascinating drama of evolution daily, minutely, and with an effort to
understand it as far as I could, for my own pleasure and information.
I scarcely know whence the suggestion had come; probably almost by
inheritance, for my mother and grandmother had both been in somewhat
notable degree observers of the development of babies’ minds. But,
unlike them, I had the notebook habit from college and editorial days,
and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found
myself in possession of a large mass of data.

A few days after my own notes began I obtained Professor Preyer’s
record, and without it I should have found the earliest weeks quite
unintelligible. For some months my notes were largely memoranda of the
likenesses and differences between my niece’s development and that
of Preyer’s boy, and I still think this is the best way for a new
observer to get started. As time went on, I departed more and more from
the lines of Preyer’s observations, and after the first year was little
influenced by them. Later, I devoted a good deal of study to the notes,
and tried to analyze their scientific results.

There is one question that I have been asked a hundred times about
baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it make
them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first this
seemed to me an odd misapprehension--as if people supposed observing
children meant doing something to them. But I have no doubt it could
be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There are thousands of
parents who tell anecdotes about children before their faces every
day in the year, and if such a parent turns child student it is hard
to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting a child’s mind
openly, questioning the little one about himself, and experimenting
with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is as worthless
scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of an
observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose simplicity
and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no competent
observer tampers with the child in any way. If Professor Preyer,
observing the baby as he first grasps at objects, notes down the way
in which he misdirects his inexpert little hands; if Mrs. Barus keeps
record of her boy’s favorite playthings; if I sit by the window and
catch with my pencil my niece’s prattle as she plays about below--and
if these babies afterward turn out spoiled, the mischief must be
credited to some other agency than the silent notebook.

Even direct experimenting on a child is not so bad as it sounds. When
you show a baby his father’s photograph to see if he recognizes it,
you are experimenting on him. The only difference between the child
student’s experimenting and that which all the members of the family
are doing all day with the baby, is that the student knows better what
he is trying to find out, and that he writes it down.

Probably women are more skillful than men in quietly following the
course of the child’s mind, even leading him to reveal himself without
at all meddling with him or marring his simplicity. It has been so
in a marked degree in the cases I have seen. But no one who has good
judgment will allow himself to spoil both the child and his own
observation; and any one who has not good judgment will find plenty of
ways to spoil a child more potent than observing him.




II

THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENTS.


“Its first act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout
of joy, as Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then long, thin,
tearless _á--á_, with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic,
but of discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red,
shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the
first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged,
it is not strange that, if the mother has not followed Froebel’s
exhortations and come to love her child before birth, there is a brief
interval occasionally dangerous to the child before the maternal
instinct is fully aroused.”

It cannot be denied that this unflattering description is fair enough,
and our baby was no handsomer than the rest of her kind. The little boy
uncle, who had been elated to hear that his niece resembled him, looked
shocked and mortified when he saw her. Yet she did not lack admirers.
I have never noticed that women (even those who are not mothers) mind
a few little æsthetic defects, such as these that President Hall
mentions, with so many counterbalancing charms in the little warm,
soft, living thing.

Nor is it women only who find the new baby enchanting--in Germany, at
least. Semmig, whose “Tagebuch eines Vaters” is one of the earliest
attempts at a record, is delighted even with the “dismal and monotonous
cry.” “Heavenly music of the first cry!” he exclaims, “sacred voice of
life, first sound of the poem of a heart, first note of the symphony
of human life, thou echo of God’s word! What sound is like unto thee?”
“Yes, it is so: the cry of the baby is music! When it is still,
especially in the night, one is uneasy; one longs for this primitive
expression of the little being, and is consoled, enraptured, when the
helpless creature breaks into loud wails, and says to us: I live, give
me what I need! Oh, cry of the baby in the night, nightingale song for
mother and father!”

Our baby was at least a handsome one from the doctor’s point of view,
strong, healthy, and well formed; and this is to be taken into account
as a determining factor in all the record that follows.

I thought that she must be out of the normal in the matter of legs,
so oddly brief were the fat little members. Afterward I learned that
all babies are built that way--and indeed that they are altogether
so different in structure from the grown man that Dr. Oppenheim, in
his book on “The Development of the Child,” comes near to saying that
we must regard the infant as a different animal form from the adult,
almost as the caterpillar is different from the butterfly. Common
speech recognizes this in the case of several of the higher animals,
naming the young form as differently as if it were a different species.
We say a colt, a calf, a puppy, a baby; not a young horse, cow, dog, or
man.

We call a baby a little copy of the man, but really if he were
magnified to man’s size and strength, we should regard him at first
glance as an idiot and monster, with enormous head and abdomen, short
legs, and no neck, not to speak of the flat-nosed, prognathous face;
and on the other hand, a baby that was really a small copy of man’s
body would seem positively uncanny. We see this in old pictures, where
the artist tried to depict babies by placing small-sized men and women
in the mother’s arms.

The middle point of the baby’s length falls a little above the navel,
the abdomen and legs together making up a little more than half the
whole length; in the man the legs alone make a trifle more than half.
In proportion to the baby’s total weight, its brain weighs seven times
as much as a grown person’s, its muscles little more than half as much.

“The two [man and baby] do not breathe alike, their pulse rates are not
alike, the composition of their bodies is not alike.” The baby’s body
at birth is 74.7 per cent. water, ours 58.5 per cent. It is largely due
to its loose, watery structure that the baby’s brain is so heavy--which
shows the folly of trying to compare mental powers by means of brain
weights, as is so often done in discussing woman’s sphere. As Donaldson
says, if there were anything in that basis of comparison, the new-born
baby would be the intellectual master of us all. The baby has bright
red and watery marrow, instead of the yellow, fatty substance in
our bones; and its blood differs so from ours in proportion of red
and white corpuscles and in chemical make-up as to “amount almost
to a difference in kind,” says Dr. Oppenheim, who adds that such a
condition of marrow or blood, if found in a grown person, would be
considered an indication of disease.

The organs are differently placed within the body, and even differently
formed. The bony structure is everywhere soft and unfinished, the
plates of the skull imperfectly fitted together, with gaps at the
corners; and it is well that they are, for if the brain box were closed
tight the brain within could never grow. Surgeons have lately even made
artificial openings where the skull was prematurely perfect, to save
the baby from idiocy. The bony inclosures of the middle ear are quite
unfinished, so that on the one side catarrhal inflammations from the
nose and throat travel up to the ear more readily than in later life,
while on the other side ear inflammations are more likely to pass into
the brain. The spine is straight, like an ape’s, instead of having the
double curve of human-kind, which seems to be brought about by the pull
of the muscles after we have come to stand erect.

I have quoted these details from Oppenheim, and from Vierordt’s and
Roberts’s measurements, as given by Dr. Burk (“Growth of Children
in Height and Weight.”) Some of the figures are given otherwise by
other authorities. I might fill many pages with similar details. Some
of these differences do not disappear till full manhood, others are
gone in a few weeks after birth. And in them all there is so constant
a repetition of lower animal forms that anatomists are brought to a
confidence in the “recapitulation doctrine,” such as they can hardly
give to others by means of a few sample facts.

The most curious of all the monkey traits shown by the new-born baby
is the one investigated by Dr. Louis Robinson (“Nineteenth Century,”
November, 1891). It was suggested by “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” The
question was raised in conversation whether a limp and molluscous baby,
unable so much as to hold up its head on its helpless little neck,
could do anything so positive as to “rastle with” Kentuck’s finger;
and the more knowing persons present insisted that a young baby does,
as a matter of fact, have a good firm hand-clasp. It occurred to Dr.
Robinson that if this was true it was a beautiful Darwinian point, for
clinging and swinging by the arms would naturally have been a specialty
with our ancestors if they ever lived a monkey-like life in the trees.
The baby that could cling best to its mother as she used hands, feet,
and tail to flee in the best time over the trees, or to get at the more
inaccessible fruits and eggs in time of scarcity, would be the baby
that lived to bequeath his traits to his descendants; so that to this
day our housed and cradled human babies would keep in their clinging
powers a reminiscence of our wild treetop days.

Dr. Robinson was fortunate enough to be able to test his theory on some
sixty babies in the first hours of their life, and was triumphantly
successful. He clasped their hands about a slender rod, and they swung
from it like athletes, without apparent discomfort, by the half minute;
many of us grown people could not do as well. Such a remarkable power
of hands and arms has for ages been of no especial use to the human
race, and it fades out in a few weeks, but for many months the arms
keep ahead of the legs in development.

Here was not only strength of arms, but the ability to perform quite
skillfully an action, that required the working together of a number of
muscles to a definite end,--the action namely, of clasping an object
with the hand. This is one of several actions that come ready-made to
the baby at birth, before he can possibly have had any chance to learn
them, or any idea of what they are for. Babies sneeze, swallow, and
cry on the first day; they shut their eyes at a bright light, or at a
touch. On the first day, moreover, they have been seen to start at a
sound or a jar; Preyer observed hiccoughing, choking, coughing, and
spreading the toes when the soles were tickled; and Darwin saw yawning
and stretching within the first week, though I do not know that any one
has seen it on the first day.

These movements are all of the class called reflex,--movements, that
is, in which the bodily mechanism is set off by some outside action on
the senses, as a gun is set off by a touch on the trigger. Thus, when a
tickling affects the mucous membrane, a sneeze executes itself without
any will of ours; when our sense of sight perceives a swift missile
coming, the neck muscles mechanically jerk the head to one side.

We grown people have, however, a good deal of power of holding in our
reflexes,--“inhibiting” them, as the technical expression is,--but the
baby has none at all. If they had a highly developed reflex activity,
babies would be in real danger from the unrestrained acts of their own
muscles, as we see in the case of convulsions, which show reflex action
at its extreme. But the actions I have mentioned are about all the
reflex movements that have been noted in new-born babies, except what
are called the periodic reflexes, such as breathing, the heartbeat, the
contractions of the arteries, and all the regular muscular actions of
organic life.

That so complex a system of movement as these periodic reflexes should
be so readily touched into motion upon contact with air and food, to
maintain itself afterward by the interplay of the bodily mechanism
and external forces, shows a ready-made hereditary activity far more
than the sudden reflexes do. It does not work quite smoothly at first,
however: the establishment of breathing, for instance, is irregular,
and often difficult. Even the sudden reflexes are slower and less
perfect than with older people.

There is another class of movements, often confused with the
reflex--that is, instinctive movements. Real grasping (as distinguished
from reflex grasping), biting, standing, walking, are examples of this
class. They are race movements, the habits of the species to which
the animal belongs, and every normal member of the species is bound to
come to them; yet they are not so fixed in the bodily mechanism as the
reflex movements. The stimulus to them seems to come more from within
than from without--yet not from reason and will, but from some blind
impulse. This impulse is usually imperfect, and the child has to work
his own way to the mastery of the movements. Yet though certain reflex
activities are inherited in a more highly developed condition than any
human instincts, the instincts are at bottom _always_ hereditary, which
is not the case with the reflexes--any one may teach his muscles new
reflex movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every
time that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of
their own accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct
cannot be thus acquired.

The amazing instincts of the lower animals; the imperfect and broken
condition of the instincts in man, yet the deep hold that they have
on him; the mingling of inherited necessity and individual freedom in
the way in which they are worked out; the mystery of the physiological
method by which they act (while that of reflex movement is fairly well
understood, up to a certain point); the light they seem always about to
shed for the biologist on the profoundest problems of heredity, and for
the philosopher on those of free will and personality,--these things
make instinct one of the great fields of present research, and I must
not venture into it, though it is of importance in trying to understand
a baby.

I shall say only that while instinct does not appear in the lowest
animals (whose action is all of the reflex type), and is for a time a
sign of rising rank in the scale of life, it reaches its culmination
with the insects, and as we approach man it is the breaking up of the
instincts that is in its turn a sign of advancement to higher life.
The little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and
even the monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months.
Nothing is so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness
is our glory, for it means that the activities of the race (as John
Fiske has so clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too
infrequently repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before
birth; hence the long period after birth before the child comes to
full human powers. It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent
lesson of common observation) that while an organism is thus immature
and plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher
development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human race.

The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world already
developed is half a mere reflex act--that of sucking. It is started
as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil, finger, or
nipple, it may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a reflex
after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this external
stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to begin
when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex character,
that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct.

These two types of automatic movement (for instinct, however
complicated later with volition, gives rise in these earliest days
to none but automatic movement) are both “purposive,” though not
purposed--that is, they are actions that are plainly adapted to some
end by ancestral intelligence or by natural selection. But there was
another type of movements more conspicuous in our baby than either, and
apparently quite nonpurposive. From the first day she moved slightly,
but almost constantly, the legs drawing up, the arms stirring, the eyes
and head rolling a little. Sometimes the features were distorted with
vague and meaningless grimaces. Most other observers report these
movements, and inexperienced ones say that the baby “felt with his
hands about his face,” or “tried to get his hands to his head.” Any
mother may convince herself that the baby has no will in the matter by
watching till he really does begin to try, weeks later, to turn his
head, put his hands to his mouth, kick up his legs: the difference in
the whole manner of the action is evident.

An odd explanation has been offered for these movements by Dr. Mumford,
an English physiologist. He holds that they have a singular resemblance
to those of swimming amphibians; that their prototype may be seen in
any aquarium; they are, in short, survivals of the period long before
the ape-like stage, long before any mammalian stage, when our ancestors
had not yet abandoned life in the waters.

Now, although it is quite true that biologists believe that if our
ancestry is traced far enough, it does lead back to the water, still
it seems hardly possible that in a human baby, whose structure passed
the amphibian stage long before birth, the most frequent movements
should hark back to that tremendous antiquity. It is more likely that
Preyer’s explanation is the correct one: viz., that the movements
are simply due to the rapid growth of nerve centres, which causes an
overflow of nervous force to the muscles and makes them contract at
haphazard. A certain regularity is given to these chance movements by
the tendency of nerve impulse to flow in the same paths where it has
flowed before, rather than in new ones, so that the muscles are drawn
toward the position they occupied before birth. This brings the hands
constantly up about the head--a fact that later has important results
in development.

These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have
followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.”

There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none
that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows
wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that
babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.

Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton;
and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a
mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically
neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious
automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it would
be a bold psychologist who should try to say what _germ_ of thought
and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the capacity
of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a capacity is
a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing baby of
nursery tradition would be.

If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is
at a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see
that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they
miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the soul
from its invisible germ--a drama that sometimes fairly catches one’s
breath in the throat with excitement and wonder.




III

THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS.


I have said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a
conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings and
this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world that
the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I was
skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of philosophy.
Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s own experience of
the outer world as given him by his senses, or whether there are, on
the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly by nature or God,--this
is a question on which volumes have been written.

Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal
identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own
minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space, nearer
and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from herself,
as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did she feel
herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she perceive events
as happening in time succession, one after another? And did she think
of one thing as happening because of another, so that, for instance,
she was capable of crying in order to cause her dinner to be brought?

The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the
study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with them.
Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can prove
anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether babies
have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have ideas that came
direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and yet might not
enter into our inheritance of these at once.

To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but
only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s mind,
it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition
of her senses and consciousness--though without the careful special
investigations certain physiologists had made before, I should have
found it blind guessing as to how much she really did see, hear, and
feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside her little mind,
and could only be inferred from her behavior.

She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the
first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to gentle
light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report also
a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The
nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the case
of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of the
eyes toward a person coming near her--that is, toward a large dark
mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be regarded as
entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward the light,
and among animal movements this is one of the most primitive; while the
habit of looking toward any dark moving mass runs far back in animal
history, and may well have become fixed in the bodily mechanism. With
the beginning of voluntary looking these instinctive movements fade.

No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first
fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They
did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of focus
for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move always in
unison,--and as the lids also had by no means learned yet to move
symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some extraordinary
and alarming contortions resulted.

True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of opening
the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great deal of
minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the lenses, and
it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs of light and
dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has learned the
adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only, for no trace
of color sense has ever been detected within the first fortnight of
life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year.

The baby showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day, when
she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight feet
from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds--oftener the
rustling of paper than anything else--could make her start or cry.

It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists
that babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to
several days after birth. The outer tube of the ear is often closed by
its own walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even
after the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are
noticed; perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps
because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps because
sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort of blur,
just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee babies is
to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements, it is well
for them that hearing is so tardy in development.

There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only
among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A
sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on the
next.

In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If
a baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more
likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes
restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he felt
a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good
sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.

Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning till
much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to account for
the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she was not hungry
she would suck the most tasteless object as cheerfully as any other.
Physiologists, however, have had the daring to make careful test of
smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee drop of quinine, sugar,
salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues, and strong odors to
their noses, and have been made certain by the resulting behavior that
these senses do exist from the first. But it requires rather strong
tests to call them into action. Many babies, for instance, suck at a
two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were sugar; so it seems
unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of milk, and the neutral
smells by which any well-kept baby is surrounded, are really perceived
at all. There are instances related of very positive discrimination
between one milk and another, either by taste or smell, shown by very
young babies; yet the weight of evidence points to an almost dormant
condition of these two senses.

We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but
psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group,
called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure,
the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal
ones of the group.

Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched.
She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort
in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the
contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water.
She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple
on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately
sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other
sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.

On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less
sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps
to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This
is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and
cold upon the baby are unimportant.

Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and
being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite
sensations either of heat or of cold.

The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give
impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make
definite these impressions,--the eye at the end of the optic nerve,
the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another
sense now claims almost to rank with them,--the recently studied
sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance
in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one
can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the
semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the
oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of
animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect
that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that
much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals--even
as high as fishes--may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.

I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been
shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and
moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to
balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there
was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who
showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they
were lowered swiftly in the arms.

There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the
whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be caught
quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is
said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie
Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of
Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was audible. A
jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures of very
low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to jarring
from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the scale of the
balance in which he was lying immediately after birth sprang up.

Then there is the “muscle sense”--the feeling of the action of our own
muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is safe
to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary
movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly conceivable
how else she could have learned to make voluntary ones. But that is
another story, and comes later.

Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel.
There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the
inner organs,--hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people, nausea,
suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be added; but
little babies certainly do not feel nausea,--their food regurgitates
without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable sensations when
they choke in nursing.

Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic;
and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in
the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was
always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but
not entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma,
nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that “babies
needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic, insomnia,
nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little fellow
wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I said in my
last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the evaporation from
the loose texture of the skin is very great. After children can talk,
they wear out the most robust patience with incessant appeals, night
and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in quantities quite beyond
what seems rational. But their craving is doubtless a true indication
of what they need.

There are composites of sensation which the baby experiences very
early. There is the feeling of clothes, for instance, made up of
warmth, of touch and pressure sensations all over his skin, and of
changes in the muscular feelings from constraint, and in the internal
feelings from the effect on circulation. There are feelings of fatigue
in one position, made up of sensations of touch, of the pressure of the
body’s weight on the under surfaces of skin, of some muscular tensions,
and perhaps of several other elements. Our baby’s nurse saved her much
fretting by simply changing the position of the little body from time
to time. We ourselves are constantly moving and shifting our positions,
to relieve a pressure on the skin here, or a muscular tension there,
but the wee baby cannot so much as turn his head or move a limb at will.

Vaguest and most composite of all is what is called “common sensation,”
or “general sensation”--that feeling of comfort or discomfort, vigor
or languor, diffused through the whole body, with which we are all
familiar. It seems to be very primitive in origin--indeed, the
speculation is that this dim, pervasive feeling is the original one,
the primitive way in which animal tissue responded to light and heat
and everything, before the special senses developed, gathering the
light sensations to one focus, the sound sensations to another, and so
on. But in its present development it is also largely made up of the
sum of all the organic sensations, and even of dim overflows of feeling
from the special senses.

It is with older people notably connected with emotional states. It
varies, of course, with health and external conditions; yet each person
seems from birth to be held to a certain fixed habit in this complex
underlying condition of feeling--pleasant with one, unpleasant with
another. This fixed habit of general sensation is perhaps the secret
of what we call temperament; while its surface variations seem to be
mainly responsible for moods.

Our baby showed temperament--luckily of the easy-going and cheerful
kind--from her first day (though we could hardly see this except by
looking back afterward); and there is no reason to doubt that she
experienced some general sensation from the first. It was evidently of
a pretty neutral sort, however: the definite appearance of high comfort
and well-being did not come till later; nor were moods apparent at
first.

Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from the
first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby could
not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to remember and
compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was shown plainly
from the first hour by expressions of face--reflex facial movements,
so firmly associated in the human race with liking and disliking that
the most inexperienced observer recognizes their meaning at once. It
is said that facial expression comes by imitation, and that the blind
are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of these simplest
expressions: they come by inheritance, and are present in the first
hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the monotonous cry, and
vague movements of limbs, head, and features,--these are the limits of
expression of feeling in the earliest days.

It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that could
give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality. We
have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,--when people say
after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be inside their
own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or when we feel
diffused warmth.

Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little
creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle
light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or
comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt
motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and,
after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now
and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed
jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to time,
but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this became
evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and steady
slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that held her,
from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.

From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of
pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till
they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened
comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or
release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her
circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight
and unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly
relieved by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded,
neither consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole
pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of
her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew
nothing.

Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later
comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the feelings
of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all
unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue,
were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to
accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention,
interest, discrimination, and vivid life.




IV

THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS


Out of the new-born baby’s dim life of passivity the first path was
that of vision. I noticed about the end of the second week that her
eyes no longer wandered altogether helplessly, but rested with a long
and contented gaze on bright surfaces they chanced to encounter, such
as the shining of the lamp on the white ceiling, or our faces turned
toward the light as she lay on our knees. It was not active looking,
with any power to direct the eyes, but mere staring; when the gaze
fell by chance on the pleasant light, it clung there. But something
must have come to pass, that it _could_ stop and cling to what gave it
pleasure.

I think no one has yet analyzed this earliest stage in progress toward
real seeing, though Professor Sully touches on an explanation when
he says that the eyes “maintain their attitude under stimulus of the
pleasure.”

We know that muscular action is normally caused by stimulus received
from the nerve centres, and that in the earliest days there seems
to be a good deal of random discharge of stimulus, developed by the
growth of the centres, and causing aimless movements. Now there are
two fundamental and profoundly important things about this nervous
discharge. One is that pleasure, attention, or intensity of sensation
seems to have the power of increasing it, and thus influencing the
action of the muscles. The other is that the discharge always tends to
seek the same paths it has used before, and more and more easily each
time; so that physiologists speak of it as a current deepening its
channels. It is really nothing like a flowing liquid, nor the nerve
threads along which it passes like channeled watercourses. Still, just
as a current of water will deepen a gully till it drains into itself
all the water that had spread about in shallower ditches, so the wave
of molecular change running along a nerve somehow so prepares that
nerve that by and by, instead of spreading about through any fibres
that come handy, the whole energy will drain into the accustomed ones.
Then, of course, the muscles to which these run will perform more and
more easily the accustomed acts. Some of these channels--even whole
connected systems of them--are already well prepared by inheritance,
and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are still to be
deepened by the baby’s own experience.

Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye muscles,
making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a certain
position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant brightness
flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs within that has
power to send an intenser current through those same fibres. For the
time, at least, that channel is deepened, the wandering impulses are
drained into it, and the eye muscles are held steady in that position.
And, in fact, with the beginning of staring the irregular movements of
head and eyes did decline, and gradually disappear.

It is an important moment that marks the beginning of even a passive
power to control the movements; and when my grandmother handed down the
rule that you should never needlessly interrupt a baby’s staring, lest
you hinder the development of power of attention, she seems to have
been psychologically sound.

A fuller and pleasanter life now seemed to pervade the whole little
body. The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the baby
began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed and dry,
gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release from
clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm water heightened
the pleasant condition of general sensation, her expression approached
real delight; the movements of her limbs were freer, and all her
muscles tenser.

The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”--that is,
supplied with nervous energy--as fairly to lift her head from the
supporting hand. This was probably not as yet a real effort to hold
up the head, only a drafting of surplus energy into the neck muscles,
partly because of inherited aptitude, partly because the pleasure
received from the lifted head and better seeing tended to draw the
energy thither, just as it was drawn to the eye muscles in the case
of the staring. At least one careful observer, Mrs. Edith Elmer Wood,
records this action of the neck muscles on the first day.

It was at this period that the baby first smiled; but being forewarned
of the “colic smile,” which counterfeits so exactly the earliest
true smiles,--fleeting as these are, just touching the mouth and
vanishing,--I never felt sure whether the baby was smiling for general
contentment with life, or whether a passing twinge had crossed her
comfort and drawn her lips into the semblance of a smile; and so never
dared to record the expression till it first occurred for unmistakable
pleasure.

There must have been rapid progress going on in the clearness of
muscular and touch sensations, and in the forming of associations in
the baby’s mind; but no plain evidence of these inner processes came
till the fourth week. Then I noticed that the baby, when crying with
hunger, would hush as soon as she was taken in the arms in the position
usual in nursing, as if she recognized the preliminaries, and knew she
was about to be satisfied. She could not, in fact, have remembered or
expected anything as yet; it was not memory, but a clear instance of
the working of that great law of association by which the raw material
of the senses was to be wrought up into an orderly mental life.

The substance of the law is that when experiences have repeatedly been
had together, the occurrence of one of them (still more, of several
out of a group, as in this case) tends to bring up into consciousness
the others. It is a law that underlies psychic life as profoundly as
the law that nerve energy seeks its old channels underlies physical
life. Indeed, it is in a sense the psychic side of the same law; for
it implies that when a group of nerve centres have formerly acted
together, the action of one tends to bring on that of the rest. So,
since the baby had often experienced the feeling of that particular
position (a combination of tactile and muscular and organic sensations)
in connection with the feeling of satisfied hunger, that comfortable
feeling, the missing member of the group, came into her consciousness
along with the rest, some moments in advance of the actual satisfaction.

I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of
memory. A past experience is brought back to consciousness; and if it
were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it
would be memory.

Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the
twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her
grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being
and content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of
attention. I came and sat down close by, leaning over the baby, so that
my face must have come within the indirect range of her vision. At that
she turned her eyes to my face and gazed at it with the same appearance
of attention, and even of some effort, shown by a slight tension of
brows and lips, then turned her eyes back to her grandmother’s face,
and again to mine, and so several times. The last time she seemed to
catch sight of my shoulder, on which a high light struck from the lamp,
and not only moved her eyes, but threw her head far back to see it
better, and gazed for some time, with a new expression on her face--“a
sort of dim and rudimentary eagerness,” says my note. She no longer
stared, but really looked.

Clear seeing, let us here recall, is not done with the whole retina,
but only with a tiny spot in the centre, the so-called “yellow spot,”
or “macula lutea.” If the image of an object falls to one side of this,
especially if it is far to one side, we get only a shapeless impression
that something is there; we “catch a glimpse of it,” as we say. In
order really to look at it we turn our eyeballs toward the object till
the image falls on the spot of clear vision. We estimate the distance
through which to turn the balls, down to minute fractions of an inch,
by the feeling in the eye muscles.

This was what the baby had done, and I do not dare to say how many
philosophical and psychological discussions are involved in her
doing it. Professor Le Conte thinks that it shows an inborn sense of
direction, since the eyes are turned, not toward the side on which
the ray strikes the retina, but toward the side from which the ray
enters the eye; that is, the baby thinks out along the line of the ray
to the object it comes from, thus putting the object outside himself,
in space, as we do. Professor Wundt, the great German psychologist, is
positive that the baby has no sense of space or direction, but gains it
by just such measurements with the eye muscles; that there is no right
nor left, up nor down, for him, but only associations between the look
of things off at one side, and the feel of the eye action that brings
them to central vision.

This means that before a baby can carry the eye always through just
the right arc to look at an object, he must have made this association
between the look of things and the feel of the action separately for
each point of the retina. It is a great deal for a baby to have learned
in three weeks; still, babies have to learn fast if they are ever to
catch up with the race; and in the early roamings of the eye they
experience over and over all manner of transits of images to and fro
across the retina. Probably, too, it was still only partially learned.

I watched now for what Preyer’s record had led me to expect as the next
development in vision--the ability to follow a moving object with the
eyes; that is, to hold the yellow spot fixed on the object as it moved,
moving the eyeball in time with it in order to do so. I used my hand to
move to and fro before the baby, and could not satisfy myself that she
followed it, though she sometimes seemed to; but the day after she was
a month old I tried a candle, and her eyes followed it unmistakably;
she even threw her head back to follow it farther. In trying this
experiment, one should always use a bright object, should make sure
the baby’s eyes are fixed on it, and then should move it very slowly
indeed, right and left.

So far, there is no necessary proof of will. Longet found that the
eyes and head of a pigeon whose cerebrum had been removed would follow
a moving light. We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or talk, yet
follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a lantern along a
dark road; and if something appears on the outer edge of our vision we
often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the baby’s new expression
of intelligence and interest showed that whether she willed the
movements or not, she attended to the new impressions she was getting.

Professor Preyer noticed the same dawn of intelligence in his baby’s
face at about the same stage. And it is worth while to observe that
when I came to study my record I was surprised to find how often such
an awakening look, an access of attention, wonder, or intelligence, in
the baby’s face, had coincided with some marked step in development and
signalized its great mental importance. I should advise any one who is
observing a baby to be on the lookout for this outward and visible
sign of an inward and spiritual unfolding.

In both these visual developments the baby had proved able to use
her neck in coöperation with her eyes, throwing back her head to see
farther. It began at the same time to seem that she was really and
deliberately trying to hold up her head for the same purpose of seeing
better. She not only straightened it up more and more in the bath, but
when she was laid against one’s breast she would lift her head from
the shoulder, sometimes for twenty seconds at a time, and look about.
Preyer sets this down as the first real act of will.

The baby’s increased interest in seeing centred especially on the
faces about her, at which she gazed with rapt interest. Even during
the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes, probably
because they were oftener brought within the range of her clearest
seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving patch of
the human face (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and going in the
field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point of clearest
seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of high lights
on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the highest degree
of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. So from the very
first--before the baby has yet really seen his mother--her face and
that of his other nearest friends become the most active agents in his
development, and the most interesting things in his experience.

Our baby was at this time in a way aware of the difference between
companionship and solitude. In the latter days of the first month she
would lie contentedly in the room with people near by, but would fret
if left alone. But by the end of the month she was apt to fret when she
was laid down on a chair or lounge, and to become content only when
taken into the lap. This was not yet distinct memory and desire, but it
showed that associations of pleasure had been formed with the lap, and
that she felt a vague discomfort in the absence of these.

Just before she was a month old came an advance in hearing. So far
this sense had remained little more than a capacity for being startled
or made restless by harsh sounds. I had tested it on the twenty-third
day, and found that the baby scarcely noticed the sound of an ordinary
call bell unless it was struck within about six inches of her ear, and
suddenly and sharply at that; and on the twenty-sixth day she showed no
sign of hearing single notes of the piano, struck close to her, from
the highest to the lowest. But the next day, at the sound of chords,
strongly struck, she hushed when fretting with hunger, and listened
quietly for five minutes--her first pleasant experience through the
sense of hearing.

In the following days she would lie and take in the sound of the chords
with a look of content, staring at the same time into the face of
the person who held her, as if she associated the sound with that.
Only a few days later, when she was a month old, I thought that her
pleasure in companionship was increased if she was talked and crooned
to; and it is likely that by this time, though she had not hitherto
noticed voices, she was beginning to get them associated with the human
face--probably to the enhancement of its charm.

There were signs now, too, that touch sensations, in their principal
seat, the lips, were becoming a source of pleasure. The first smile
that I could conscientiously record occurred the day before the
baby was a month old, and it was provoked by the touch of a finger
on her lip; and a day or two later she smiled repeatedly at touches
on her lip. The day before she was a month old, also, when her lips
were brought up to the nipple, she laid hold upon it with them--the
first seizing of any sort, for her hands were still in their original
helplessness, waving vaguely about at the will of the nerve currents.

It is plain that the eyes led in the development of the psychic life.
Yet the baby was still far from real seeing. Professor Preyer believes
that there is at this stage no “accommodation” of the eyes to near
and far, although they can now be focused for right and left: that
is, both yellow spots can be brought to bear in unison on an object,
but the lenses do not yet adjust themselves to different distances.
Though the baby may have perceived direction, then, she could not have
perceived depth in space. It was only when an object chanced to be at
the distance for which her eyes were naturally adjusted that she could
have seen it clearly.

Nor is it likely that even then she saw anything as a definite outline,
but only as an undefined patch. The spot of clear vision in our eyes
is very small (a twenty-five cent piece would cover all the letters I
can take in at once on this page, if I do not let my eyes move in the
least), and the only way we ourselves see anything in definite outline
is by running our eyes swiftly over its surface and around its edges,
with long trained and unconscious skill. The baby had not yet learned
to do this. Her world of vision, much as it pleased her, was still only
patches of light and dark, with bits of glitter and motion. She could
turn her eyes and lift her head a little to make the vision clearer;
but except about her neck, eyes, and in a slight degree her lips,
she had no control of her body. She had gained much in grouping and
associating together her experiences, yet on the whole she still lived
among disjointed impressions.

In the light of such interpretations, the speculative attempts to
arrange a system of cradle education become futile. What can a swinging
ball do for a pupil whose sense apparatus is not yet in condition to
see the outline of the ball definitely? Froebel himself could not
have been expected to know much of the condition of a baby’s sense
apparatus; but modern Froebelians would be better apostles of his
almost Messianic inspiration if they were willing to throw frankly
aside his unfounded speculations and his obsolete science. The letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

Meanwhile, nature has provided an educational appliance almost
ideally adapted to the child’s sense condition, in the mother’s
face, hovering close above him, smiling, laughing, nodding, with all
manner of delightful changes in the high lights; in the thousand
little meaningless caressing sounds, the singing, talking, calling,
that proceed from it; the patting, cuddling, lifting, and all the
ministrations that the baby feels while gazing at it, and associates
with it, till finally they group together and round out into the idea
of his mother as a whole.

Our baby’s mother rather resented the idea of being to her baby only a
collection of detached phenomena, instead of a mamma; but the more you
think of it the more flattering it is to be thus, as it were, dissolved
into your elements and incorporated item by item into the very
foundations of your baby’s mental life. Herein is hinted much of the
philosophy of personality; and Professor Baldwin has written a solid
book, mainly to show from the development of babies and little children
that all other people are part of each of us, and each of us is part of
all other people, and so there is really no separate personality, but
we are all one spirit, if we did but know it.




V

BEGINNINGS OF EMOTION AND PROGRESS IN SENSE POWERS


The baby entered on her second month well content with her fragmentary
little world of glancing lights and shining surfaces, chords and
voices, disconnected touches and motions. Her smiles began to be
frequent and jolly. It was always at faces that she smiled now: nothing
else seemed half as entertaining. The way in which a baby, in these
early weeks, gazes and gazes up into one’s face, and smiles genially at
it, wiles the very heart out of one; but the baby means little enough
by it.

In this fortnight her pleasures were enlarged by introduction to a baby
carriage. The outdoor sights and sounds were of course wasted on her at
this stage of her seeing and hearing powers; but she liked the feeling
of the motion, and lay and enjoyed it with a tranquilly beatific look.
Perhaps also the fresher air and larger light sent some dim wave of
pleasant feeling through her body.

Some days earlier, when carried out in arms for her first outdoor
visit, she had found the light dazzling, and kept her eyes tight
shut. In all I have said of babies’ pleasure in light, I have meant
moderate light: the little eyes are easily hurt by a glare. There are
nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street
with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light
burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in
later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his
eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at
first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light:
our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like
other folk.

Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this
period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had
already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing
into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew
clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first
sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby
did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at
the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first
day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her
knees in the bath every day.

With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This,
too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because
she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was
at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee
babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any
higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands
have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case
the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was
uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the
discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex
expressions.

The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week;
but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The
baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in
and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides.
At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought
her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her
lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every
nursery,--the first time she had done this,--and it was fully five
minutes before her face was tranquil again.

There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and
Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me
(and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely
mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a
sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than
reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense
of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no
such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin
to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are
disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of
agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first
dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical
shock, led the way into the emotional life.

This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development
in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears earliest of
all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be
distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by
sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing
is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to
trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive
reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before.

And now the baby had come to six weeks old, and could hold up her head
perfectly for a quarter of a minute at a time, and liked greatly to be
held erect or in sitting position. Apparently all this was for the sake
of seeing better, for her joys still centred in her eyes. She had made
no advance in visual power, however, except that within a few days she
could follow with her eyes the motion of a person passing near her.

Human faces were still the most entertaining of all objects. She gazed
at them with her utmost look of intentness, making movements with her
hands, and panting in short, audible breaths. Nothing else had ever
excited her so, except once a spot of sunlight on her white bed.

There were signs that her experiences gathered more and more into
groups in her mind, by association. I have spoken of her earlier
association between the nursing position and being fed; now she would
check her hungry crying as soon as she felt herself lifted; and a
few days later, as soon as her mouth was washed out--a ceremony that
invariably came before nursing. At seven weeks old she opened her
mouth for the nipple on being laid in the proper position. The food
association group was enlarging; but sight did not yet enter into it:
the look of the breast did not seem to bring the faintest suggestion of
satisfied hunger, and the baby would lie and cry with her lips an inch
from it. This is natural, for she could never really have seen it at
this stage of the development of vision.

I have said that in such associations there is a germ of memory. There
is a sort of habit memory, too, that appears very early. Impressions
that have been received over and over gather a sort of familiarity
in the baby’s mind; and while he does not yet recognize the familiar
things themselves, yet he feels a change from them as something
strange--it jars somehow the even current of his feelings. Or where
impressions have been especially agreeable, they are vaguely missed
when they are absent. The consciousness of difference between society
and solitude, which our baby had showed at the end of the first month,
was habit memory of this sort.

Professor Preyer thinks that his baby showed habit memory as early as
the first week, perceiving a new food to be different from the old. Our
baby (who knew no food but mother’s milk) experienced a new taste once
or twice, when dosed for colic, and never showed the faintest sense of
novelty at it till she was six weeks old. Then she was given a little
sugar for hiccoughs, and made a face of what seemed high disgust over
it; but this particular face has been observed more than once, and is
known to be common in babies at a new taste, even a pleasant one. It
seems to be caused by a sort of surprise affecting the face muscles.

A few days later the baby showed surprise more plainly. She lay making
cheerful little sounds, and suddenly, by some new combination of the
vocal organs, a small, high crow came out--doubtless causing a most
novel sensation in the little throat, not to speak of the odd sound.
The baby fell silent instantly, and a ludicrous look of astonishment
overspread her face. Here was not only evidence of the germs of memory,
but also the appearance of a new emotion, that of genuine surprise;
and, like fright, it is one that is closely related to simple nerve
shock. From being startled to being surprised (as to being frightened)
is not a long step.

I have just spoken of the baby as making little sounds. This was a
new accomplishment. Until a few days before, she had made no sounds
except some inarticulate fretting noises, the occasional short outcry
when startled, and the “dismal and monotonous” cry that began with the
first day. This original cry was clearly on the vowel _â_ (as in fair),
with a nasal prefix--_ngâ_; but late in the sixth week it began to be
varied a little. In the fretting, too, a few syllables appeared. The
new sounds were mostly made in the open throat, and grew out of the old
_ngâ_ by slight changes in the position of the vocal organs--_ng_, and
_hng_, and _hng-â_; but now and then there was a short _wă_, _gă_, or
_hă_, or even a lip sound, as _m-bă_.

It has been said that the broad Italian _ä_ is of all sounds the
easiest, the one naturally made from an open throat: but the records
show both German and American babies beginning with the flat _â_ or
shorter _ă_. Our baby scarcely used any other vowel sound for weeks
yet.

Little sounds of content, too, began in the sixth week--mainly
inarticulate grunts and cooing murmurs; but in the course of the
seventh week, besides the sudden crow, there were a few tiny
shouts,--_a-a-ha_,--a gurgle, and some hard _g_ sounds, _ga_, and
_g-g-g_, which passed in the eighth week into a roughened _gh_, a sort
of scraping, gargling sound, not in the English language.

Our baby had a leaning to throat sounds; but other babies begin with
the lip sounds, and some, it is said, with the trilling _l_ and _r_.
It seems to be only chance what position of the vocal organs is first
used; but after once beginning to articulate, the baby seems to pass
from sound to sound by slight changes (probably made accidentally
in using the old sounds), and so goes through the list with some
regularity.

This practice in sounds may be at first quite without will, a mere
overflow of energy into the vocal organs; but it is highly important
none the less, for any creature that is to use human speech must get
the speaking muscles into most delicate training. Think what fine and
exact difference in muscular contractions we must make to be able to
say “ball,” and be sure that it will not come out “pall”!

For a week or two now the baby made a good deal of progress in control
of her body. She strove valiantly every day to keep her head erect, and
made some little advance. In the bath she began to push with her feet
against the foot of the tub, so hard that her mother could not keep the
little head from bumping on the other end. She pulled downward with
her arms when her mother held them up in wiping her. These pushing and
pulling movements may have been made for the pleasure of the feeling,
or they may have been involuntary. Perhaps they were accidental
movements, passing gradually into voluntary ones. In either case, as
they developed, the old irregular movements of legs and arms passed
away, as those of the head and face had done before.

One new bit of muscular control was undoubtedly voluntary--a trick of
putting out and drawing back the tip of her tongue between her pursed
lips. And this was something more than just one new voluntary movement.
The important thing was that she was using the movement to _bring
together the evidence of two different senses into one perception_.

When something touches against our fingers, we have one sort of feeling
in them, and quite another when we pass them over the thing and “feel
of it;” and this other, clearer feeling is really a compound one, made
up of the touch sensation in the skin and the muscle sensation in the
moving fingers. It is called “active touch,” and it is a wonderful key
to the world around us--so wonderful that with this alone it proved
possible to educate Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. This active touch
the baby had now developed in tongue and lips; not yet in the fingers.

The passive sensation of light had already been blended with muscle
sensation in something the same way, by the voluntary movement of
turning and focusing the eyes; but that complete seeing which we might
call “active sight” is a more complex power than active feeling, and
there were other associations yet to be made before it could be fully
built up. And I hope it will not spoil the interest of the story of
the baby’s sense development if I say here that the plot is going to
turn mainly on these two combinations, muscle sense with sight and
muscle sense with touch; and then recombination of these two with each
other--all welded together by voluntary movements, growing out of
involuntary ones.

All this time the baby had had a daily source of placid pleasure in
listening to chords on the piano--no longer heavy staccato chords,
but flowing ones, in the middle octaves. The baby of theory cares
for nothing but eating and sleeping; but our baby, even after she
was already fretting with hunger, would forget all about it for ten
minutes, if one would take her to the piano. Hunger, after it grew
really strong, was a sensation that swept all before it; but on the
whole, food was a matter of small interest compared with the world of
light and touch and sound.

As for sleep, the baby slept, from the first, in pretty long
periods,--six and seven hours was not uncommon,--and was wide awake
between sleeps. At such times she would lie by the half hour, looking
peacefully about her, or gazing into our faces with smiles. When we
nodded, laughed, and talked to her, her smiles seemed like friendly
responses; but this could have meant nothing, except that with our
demonstrations those little constellations of high lights and glitters,
our faces, bobbed and twinkled in a more amusing manner than ever.

At eight weeks old came the final stage in mastery of the mechanism
of vision--the power of accommodation, or adjusting the lenses for
different distances. It may have been present even earlier: it is a
hard thing for the observer to know. But the indications are that it
really did happen when I thought, the day the baby was eight weeks old.
She was lying on her mother’s knees, fixing an unusually serious and
attentive gaze on my face, and would not take her eyes away; indeed,
as her mother turned her in undressing, she screwed her head around
comically to keep her eyes fixed. At last, after some fifteen minutes,
she turned her head clear over, and gazed as earnestly at her mother’s
face. To see what she would do, her mother turned her again toward me,
and once more she surveyed me for a time, and again turned her head and
looked directly at her mother.

What was in the little mind? Was she beginning to discriminate and
compare, for the first time setting apart as two separate things the
two faces that had bent over her oftenest? Or was she simply using, on
the most convenient object, a new power of adjusting her eyes, which
filled her with serious interest by the new clearness it gave to what
she saw? At all events, she would not have looked from one to the other
with such long and attentive regard if she had not been able to focus
both faces, at their different distances; so that I felt sure the power
of accommodation was really there.

But there was more in the incident than just the advance in vision.
Hitherto when the baby had turned her head to look, it had been only
at something that she had already a glimpse of, off at the edge of the
field of vision. Now she turned to look for something quite out of
sight,--something, therefore, that must have been present as an _idea_
in the little mind, or she could not have looked for it. And in view
of what I have said of the mother’s face as the great educational
appliance in the early months, it is worth noticing that it was this
which gave the baby her first idea, so far as I could detect.

We come a step nearer, too, to true memory, when the baby can keep
thus, even for a few minutes, the idea of something formerly seen. It
was still mainly habit memory, however. She looked for an accustomed
sight in an accustomed place, bringing it to the point of clear vision
by an accustomed movement of the neck muscles. There was no evidence
till considerably later that she was capable of remembering a single,
special experience.

The next day she was singularly bright and sunny, smiling all day at
every one. She stopped in the middle of nursing to throw her head back
and gaze at the bow at her mother’s neck, and would not go on with the
comparatively uninteresting business of food till the bow was put out
of sight. That night she slept eight hours at a stretch, longer than
she had ever done. Was the little brain, perhaps, wearied with the new
rush of impressions, which came with the new power of focusing?

The day after she would lie a while unusually silent and sober, looking
about her and moving her hands a little; then she would fret to be
lifted and held against one’s shoulder, where she could hold her
head up and look about. She was able now to hold it up a long time
by resting it for a few seconds every half minute or so, against my
cheek, which I held close to give her the chance. But to-day she was
not satisfied with having her head erect: she persistently straightened
her back up against the arm that supported her--a new set of muscles
thus coming under control of her will. As often as I pressed her down
against my shoulder, she would fret, and straighten up again and set to
work diligently looking about her.

After this her progress in holding up her head was suddenly rapid,
and by the end of the month, four days later, she could balance
it for many minutes, with a little wobbling. This uncertainty soon
disappeared, and the erect position of the head was accomplished for
life.

During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most
insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think
that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean
only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted.
Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim
distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. As soon
as she was held erect, or propped up sitting amid cushions, she was
content; but the first time that she was allowed to be up thus most
of the day, she slept afterward nine unbroken hours, recuperating,
probably, quite as much from the looking and the taking in that the
little brain and eyes had been doing as from any muscular fatigue there
may have been in the position.

Such is the “mere life of vegetation” the baby lived during the first
two months. No grown person ever experiences such an expansion of
life, such a progress from power to power in that length of time. Nor
was our little girl’s development anything unusual for a healthy,
well-conditioned child, so far as other records give material for
comparison. Preyer’s boy was later than she in getting his head
balanced, but he arrived at full accommodation (and that is the most
important work of the first two months) at almost exactly the same age
as she; and so did Mrs. Hall’s boy. I do not know of any other records
that make a clear statement on this point.




VI

PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING.


The baby’s development, as I have said, consisted now mainly in forming
association groups in her mind in two series, which we might call a
sight-motor series and a touch-motor series. There had been a leap
forward in the sight-motor series when “accommodation” was learned. Now
the touch-motor series came to the front, and step by step led on to
the great accomplishment of grasping.

First, when we laid the baby’s face up against ours, her little tongue
was put out to lick the cheek that she felt, warm and smooth, against
her lips. This was a more advanced use of active feeling than the mere
passing of her tongue over her own lips, for that must have been done
accidentally many times before she began to do it on purpose; and the
association between the movement and the feeling had been helped by the
double sensation--one feeling in the lips and another in the tongue
every time they touched.

This doubling of sensation, which occurs every time one part of the
body touches another part, often seemed to wake special attention in
the baby, and thus help on a development. Later, it had a great part to
play in teaching her the boundaries of her own body, and the difference
between the Me and the Not-me. Even now, she must have been somewhat
aware of a different feeling when she passed her tongue over her own
sensitive lips, and when she passed it over the unresponsive cheek of
some one else.

So far, the tongue, not the hand, was her organ of touch. But now
the fingers were showing the first faint sign of their future
powers--nothing more than a little special sensibility, such as the
lips had shown in the first month: we would see the baby holding her
finger tips together prettily (when by chance they had collided), as if
there were a feeling there that interested her. Here again there was
double sensation.

In these same early days of the third month there was beginning another
development that was to end by making the hand the successful rival
of lips and tongue for purposes of grasping and feeling. The baby was
trying to get her fists to her mouth.

The movement of the hands toward the head is a common one in the first
weeks, by reason of prenatal habit, and thus it had often happened that
the little fists, or as much of them as could be accommodated, had
blundered into the mouth; and interesting sensations (double sensations
again, in fists and mouth) had been experienced. The baby had at the
same time felt in her arms the movement that always went with these
interesting sensations, and now she was trying to repeat it. Within
a week she had mastered it, and could mumble and suck her fists at
will--a great addition, naturally, to the comfort of life.

Meanwhile the reflex clasping, which had always taken place when an
object was laid in the baby’s palm, was growing firmer and longer,
and more like conscious holding; and I noticed that the thumb was now
“opposed” in clasping--that is, shut down opposite the fingers, an
important element in the skill of human grasping. And now, when the
fingers came in contact with convenient things--folds of the towel, for
instance--the hands would clasp them mechanically, just as the lips,
since the first month, had laid hold on a breast or cheek that touched
them.

This had an important result. The little hand would presently go to the
mouth, still mechanically clasping the fold of towel or dress, which
in consequence was sucked and mumbled, too. In this way the baby got
sundry novel sensations, and a chain of associations began to form:
she was to learn thus, by and by, that when she felt touch sensations
in her fingers, she could get livelier ones in her mouth (and also the
pleasant muscular feeling of sucking), by the movements of clasping,
and of lifting her arm. But she had not yet learned it: objects (except
her own hands) were still carried to her mouth only by accident.

By the twelfth week the baby had found that her thumb was better for
sucking purposes than chance segments of fist, and could turn her hand
and get the convenient little projection neatly into her mouth. She got
hold of it more by diving her head down to it than by lifting the hand
to the mouth. Seizing with the mouth, by motions of the head, like a
dog, instead of using the hand to wait on the mouth, seemed still her
natural way.

But the hands were gaining. In this same twelfth week I saw the little
finger tips go fumbling and feeling over our hands and dresses. They,
too, had learned active touch, as the tongue had learned it more than a
month before.

Just at this time we began to bring the baby to the table--nominally
so that no one need stay away from meals to look after her; really for
the sake of her jovial company at our sober grown-up board, where she
would sit, propped amid cushions in her high chair, gazing and smiling
sociably at our faces, crowing and flourishing her arms in joy at the
lights and the rattle of dishes, forming the sole topic of conversation
to an extent that her bachelor uncle had his private and lonely opinion
about. The high chair was one of those that have a wooden tray fastened
across the front, and here were placed several handy objects--rattle,
and ring, and string of spools. This was by the wisdom of grandma, who
saw the approach of the power of grasping. One may often see the little
hands fluttering empty, the little brain restless, craving its natural
development (for grasping is much more a matter of brain development,
through the forming of associations, than of hand development), when
there is no wise grandma to see that rattle and ring and spools lie
“handy by” a little _before_ the baby is ready to use them. To wait
till he knows how to grasp before giving him things to practice on is
like keeping a boy out of the water till he knows how to swim. Such
impeding of the natural activities is responsible for a good deal of
the fretting of babies.

It was not three days till I saw the little hands go fumbling across
the tray, seeking the objects they had become used to finding there;
and when they touched rattle or spool, they laid hold on it. Nor was
this the old mechanical clasping: it was voluntary action, and as
clumsy as new voluntary action is apt to be, compared to involuntary.
The baby did not know how to turn her hand and take up a thing neatly:
if she touched it in such fashion that she could shut down her fingers
on it somehow or anyhow, she would manage to lift it--stuck between two
fingers from behind, once, when the back of her hand had touched it; if
not, she would go on fumbling till she did. In two or three days more
she was laying hold on things and carrying them to her mouth with plain
intention.

Here was a sort of grasping, but it was grasping by feeling only. The
baby had yet no idea of an object, which she could locate with the
eye and then lay hold on with the hand. She had simply completed the
chain of association I spoke of above: she had learned, that is, that
after certain groping movements, feelings of touch appeared in her
hands; and that then, after movements of clasping and lifting, these
feelings reappeared in more lively and pleasing form in her mouth. She
never looked at the objects she touched. There is no reason to think
they could have been to her anything more than sensations in her own
hands and mouth. The sight-motor and touch-motor series had not yet
coalesced. But in these last days of the third month both had come to
the point where they were ready to begin the fusing process, and give
the baby her world of outer objects.

Before I go back to relate what had been going on meanwhile in the
sight-motor series, I must stop to speak of some other developments of
the month.

Memory, for one thing, had plainly advanced. By the tenth week the
baby had shown some doubtful signs of knowing one face from another;
and in the twelfth she plainly recognized her grandfather with a smile
and joyous cry, as he came in. Her first recognition, therefore (it is
worth while to notice), was not of the mother, the source of supplies,
but of the face that had offered most entertainment to the dawning
mental powers, not only because of the white beard, the spectacles, and
the shining bald brow, but because of the boyish abandon with which
grandpa played with her, ducking his face down to hers.

A few days later she showed that she knew at least the feeling of her
mother’s arms. For some weeks no one else had put her to sleep; and now
when sleepy she fretted in other arms, but nestled down contentedly
and went to sleep as soon as she felt herself in her mother’s. The
association of that especial feeling had become necessary to sleep.

The instinctive language of sign and sound had developed a good deal.
From the first day of the month, the baby’s joy in sights began to be
expressed more exuberantly, with flying arms and legs, with panting,
murmuring, and babbling, smiles and even small chuckles, and sometimes
little shouts and crows. A new look of grief, too, the parallelogram
shaped mouth that all babies make in crying, appeared.

In the tenth week she began to turn her head aside in refusal or
dislike--a gesture that one may see far down in the animal kingdom.
A dog, for instance, uses it very expressively. It comes plainly from
the simple effort to turn away from what is unpleasant, and develops
later to our shake of the head for “No;” and when we notice how early
the development of control over head and neck is, how much in advance
of any use of the hands, we see that it is natural for this to be the
oldest of all gestures.

In the last days of the month came two notable evidences of growing
will. One was the baby’s persistent effort to get the tip of her
rattle (it was set on a slender ivory shaft) into her mouth. Sometimes
it went in by chance; sometimes it hit her lip, and in that case she
would stretch her mouth to take it in, moving her head rather than the
rattle. But if it brought up against her cheek, too far away to be
captured by such efforts, after trying a little, she would lower the
rattle, and make a fresh start for better luck.

This may seem highly unintelligent action; yet after all, as Professor
Morgan says, it is by the method of “trial and error” that most of our
acts of skill (and perhaps all such acts of the lower animals) are
learned. In trial after trial the baby associated the muscular feeling
of the successful movement with the feeling of the rattle tip in her
mouth, and repeated these movements more and more correctly, dropping
the unsuccessful ones. In just this way the sharpshooter, through
repeated trials and misses, learns to deflect his rifle barrel this way
and that with an infinite fineness of muscular contractions, which he
could never get by reasoning on it.

The other effort of will was in sitting up. During the whole month the
baby had insisted on a sitting position, and had wailed as vigorously
over being left flat on her back as over being left hungry. She had
soon tried to take the matter into her own hands, and made many efforts
to lift herself, sometimes by pulling on our fingers when we had laid
them in her hands, sometimes by sheer strain of the abdominal muscles.
She never succeeded in raising more than her head and shoulders till
the last week of the month: then she did once lift herself, and in the
following days tried with the utmost zeal to repeat the success. She
would strive and strain, with a grave and earnest face, her whole baby
soul evidently centred on the achievement. She would tug at our fingers
till her little face was crimson; she would lift her head and shoulders
and strain to rise higher, fall back and try it again, till she was
tired out. The day she was three months old, she tried twenty-five
times, with scarcely a pause, and even then, though she was beginning
to fret pitifully with disappointment, she did not stop of her own
accord.

Unless she began with a somewhat high reclining position, or her feet
or hips were held, her little legs would fly up, and she could not get
the leverage to lift her body. For that matter, even with us the legs
are lighter than the trunk, and few women can overcome the difference,
and lift themselves by sheer strength of the abdominal muscles, without
having the feet held: and a baby’s legs are so much lighter than ours
that it must be for several years a sheer impossibility for him to do
it.

However, in the few cases when the baby did manage, by some advantage
of position, or by holding to our fingers, to lift herself, she could
not balance in the least, and toppled over at once. What with this
discouragement, and restraint from her elders, who thought her back by
no means strong enough yet for sitting alone, she soon after gave up
the effort to raise herself, and waited till she was older.

It was in this same eventful thirteenth week that the baby first looked
about, searching for something that was out of sight. A lively young
girl with bright color and a charming pair of dangling eye-glasses was
visiting us, and stood by, laughing and prattling to the baby while
she was bathed. The little one, greatly interested, turned her head,
smiling and crowing, to watch Miss Charmian’s movements, and to look
for her when she was out of sight. In this, as in the definite efforts
to feel the rattle tip in her mouth, and to renew the sensations
of sitting up, we see action guided by an idea of that which is
absent, that is by imagination, to a certain extent at least; though
it is probable that there was still as much of the mere working of
association as of definite ideas. The memory that the baby showed when
she looked about, searching for an expected sight, instead of simply
turning to an accustomed place, is clearly more than mere habit memory.
Yet it was still not true memory: it was not an idea coming back to
the mind after an interval, but only a sort of after-shine of the
thing, held in the mind for a few moments after the thing itself had
disappeared.

And now to come back to the sight-motor series: Did the baby still see
objects only as blurs of light and shade? She had the full mechanism of
her eyes in working order as soon as accommodation was acquired; but it
is certain that it takes much practice to learn to use that mechanism.
It is an old story that people born blind, receiving their sight by
surgical operations, have to _learn_ to see. Professor Preyer quotes
from Dr. Home the case of a twelve year old boy who, nearly a month
after the operation, could not tell whether a square card had corners
or not by looking at it; and of another seven year old boy who had to
learn to recognize triangles and squares (which he knew well by touch)
by running his eye along the edges and counting the corners. It must
have taken immense practice for us all to learn to flash the eye so
quickly over and about an object that we seem to take in its shape with
one look. This was the task that lay before the baby now.

How long it took we can only guess. Some observers have taken it for
granted that the first recognition of a face showed clear seeing had
arrived. But the group of lights and shades is so different in each
face that a baby might well learn to know them apart without distinct
outlines. We have all seen French paintings in which the eyes, the
smile, some high lights on cheek, chin, and nose, and a cloudy
suggestion of hair and beard, are all that emerge from the dark canvas,
and yet we may see easily for whom the portrait is meant. Our baby
had recognized no face yet except her grandfather’s, where the beard,
spectacles, and shining bald brow made recognition easy without any
outline.

But in another direction we get a plainer hint. I have spoken above of
the joyous excitement roused in the baby by interesting sights (not
only faces now, but also sundry bright things, and dangling, moving
things) early in the month. By the middle of the month her smiles
were fewer, and she looked about her earnestly and soberly; and in the
last week I noted, without understanding, the expression of surprise
that had come into her face as she gazed this way and that. The wide,
surprised eyes must have meant that something new was before them. Were
things perhaps beginning to separate themselves off to the baby’s sight
in definitely bounded spaces?

I must go on into the record of the next month for more light on this
question: for the wonder grew day by day, and for weeks the baby was
looking about her silently, studying her world. She would inspect the
familiar room carefully for many minutes, looking fixedly at object
after object till the whole field of vision was reviewed, then she
would turn her head eagerly and examine another section; and when she
had seen all she could from one place, she would fret till she was
carried to another, and there begin anew her inspection of the room in
its changed aspect--always with the look of surprise and eagerness,
eyes wide and brows raised.

We can only guess what was going on in the baby mind all this time; but
I cannot resist the thought that I was looking on at that very process
which must have taken place somewhere about this time--the learning to
see things clear and separate, by running the eyes over their surfaces
and about their edges.

With this, sight and muscle sense alone, touch and muscle sense alone,
had done all they could to reveal the world to the baby, and there lay
close before her the further revelations that were to be made when
touch, sight, and muscle sense could be focused all together on the
objects about her. It was a wonderful sight to see, as the baby pressed
forward to the new understanding, eager, amazed, and absorbed.




VII

SHE LEARNS TO GRASP, AND DISCOVERS THE WORLD OF THINGS


The baby had finished her first quarter year. A few days before, as we
have seen, she had looked for a person out of sight; and now, just at
the end of the third month, she showed that she could bring together
the testimony of sight and hearing, by turning to look in the direction
of a sound.

Here seems evidence that by this time (whether she had done so before
or not) she “externalized” her impressions more or less: that is, when
waves of sound struck on her tympanum, or of light on her retina, she
did not simply _feel_ the resulting sensation, but threw it back,
so to speak, along the line of the wave, and seemed to herself to
perceive something outside there, away from her. For when she looked
around, seeking what she did not yet see, expecting sight sensations
and hearing sensations to come from the same source, it is impossible
to think she did not have a feeling of something really there, outside
herself.

Step by step with the sense of outsideness there must have come a sense
of insideness, of self, for the two are only opposite sides of one
feeling--that is, the feeling of _difference_ between oneself and the
outer world. We must not suppose that before the baby externalized her
impressions she felt everything as happening inside her: she must have
just felt things, with no inside or outside about it.

This may seem impossible, but really the sense of insideness and
outsideness is not hard to upset, even at our time of life. Dizziness
or mental shock will do it. Sometimes on waking from deep sleep we find
our sense of a separate bodily self gone, and gather it slowly back. We
may almost lose ourselves by lying idly, without thought or care, in
some great, continuous sound, like the roar of a cataract, till we do
not know which is ourself and which is the outward sound. Mystics and
ecstatics have made an art of changing the bodily feelings by fasting
and other means, till the usual marks of difference among impressions,
by which we externalize some and refer others to our own bodies, are
lost; and with them the sense of being in the body, surrounded by an
outer world.

Though she externalized sight and sound, it is not likely that the baby
at this stage distinguished external and internal in touch impressions,
unless about her face. She had not at all learned the bounds of her
own body yet. Below her arms, her control of it was almost nothing.
She could not turn herself over. She had never passed her hands over
her own surface, and knew it only by chance touches. She understood
so little her relation even to her hands, which were fairly under
control, that when they met by chance, each hand would seize the
other, and try to take it to her mouth. She was often aggrieved by the
unexpected result when she tried to flourish her arm and go on sucking
her thumb at the same time, and could not imagine what had suddenly
snatched the cherished thumb away. Her feeling of herself must have
been very different from ours: more like that of a conventional cherub,
all but her head dissolved away into oneness with the outside world.

Did she, then, seeing the vision of the world, see it as a world of
_things_--solid objects, visible and tangible? Probably not. Her whole
behavior showed that she had never blended the feel of a thing and
the look of a thing into the perception of the thing itself. If her
body was touched anywhere, she never looked toward the place to see
what touched her. When she groped on her tray, she seemed to be merely
repeating motions that had formerly brought sensations, not seeking
for things that she supposed were there; she never looked for them, nor
even looked at them as she held them; she seemed to have no suspicion
that the feeling in her hand was due to a visible object there.

Nor could she well have had any idea of an object, even as one may
get it from touch alone, without sight; for she did not feel over the
things she held--she was conscious only of the part that touched her.
If she laid hold of her rattle one day by one part, and another day by
another, she could not have known it was the same object, except as
she learned a little about it in fumbling for a better hold. In short,
the things she touched and held can hardly have been to her definite
objects, but only disjointed touch and weight sensations.

With no more material than this, children born blind do build up in
time the idea of a world of things; but seeing children have a much
quicker and completer way.

Just at the end of the third month the baby had once gazed at her
rattle as she held it in her hand; but it was not till the second week
of the fourth month that she seemed really to learn that when she felt
the familiar touch in her hand, she could see something by looking.
Then her eyes began to rest on things while she picked them up; but in
a blank and passive way--the eyes looking on like outsiders, while the
awkward little hands fumbled just as they would have done in the dark.
The baby seemed to have no idea that what she saw was the same thing as
what she felt.

There was about a fortnight of this. Then, on one great day, when three
weeks of the month had passed, the baby looked at her mother’s hand,
held up before her, and made fumbling motions toward it, keeping her
eyes on it, till her hand struck it; then took hold of it. She had
formed an association between the sight of an object and the groping
movement of her hand toward it.

It was not till the last week of the month that she put out her hand
directly to the thing she wanted, instead of clawing vaguely toward it;
and even then it was doubtfully done. Still, it was real grasping, by
guidance of the eye. She was coming to realize that what she saw was
one with what she could feel; that there were _things_, which could be
reached for and got hold of. That is, the sight-motor series and the
touch-motor series were coalescing at last, and giving the baby a world
of objects. She had an immensity to learn as to their form, weight,
distance, and all that; but she had the key now for learning it.

The discovery of the new quality of tangibility in the visible world
must have been gradual, however, and her new power of grasping hardly
more at first than a blind use of association. In the next fortnight
she grasped doubtfully, depending only partly on sight for guidance.
She would put out her hand uncertainly, with fingers spread, not
ready to grasp, and it was only when they touched the object that her
movement became confident. Sometimes both little hands were brought
cautiously down on either side of the thing she wished to get hold of.

In this fortnight she grasped better with the mouth than with the
hands, and was more disposed to use it. She brought her mouth to the
nipple easily by sight. She dived at me with her head to get the loose
folds of my bodice into her mouth. In our arms, she would attack our
faces with a sudden dive of her head and a funny doubling up movement
of her body, and would mouth them over with satisfaction. One day,
as she lay on her back, a rubber ring fell out of her mouth, and lay
encircling her nose, resting on its bridge and on the upper lip; she
made many efforts to reach it with her lips, stretching her mouth open
ridiculously, but had no idea of using the little hands, which were
fluttering wildly in helpless sympathy.

During this early period of grasping, the baby was far from
appreciating what a world of delight had opened to her. Her great
interest all the fourth month and on into the fifth was in the use
of her eyes, in those eager surveys of things that I have spoken of;
and absorbed in this, she had unconsciously and almost mechanically
gathered together the associations of sight and feeling and muscle
sense, till grasping had come about, merely as a more efficient way of
getting things into the mouth.

Professor Preyer and most other observers have tried to account for
this persistent drift of everything to the baby’s mouth by the theory
of taste association: the baby’s most agreeable experience has been
that of tasting milk, and so he connects all pleasure with the idea
of getting things to his mouth. This seems to me quite untenable. An
association between taste and the feeling of something in the mouth
would not be formed unless the two occurred together quite regularly;
and what with the washing out of a baby’s mouth each time he is nursed,
and the frequent stumbling in of his hands, and later the deliberate
sucking of fists, he finds tasteless objects there oftener than milk.
Again, it is not the movement of the hands up to the mouth that would
become associated with food, but rather the feeling of being laid at
the breast (which our baby did in fact associate early with food, as I
have related). And in the third place, there is not the least evidence
that taste is the most agreeable experience of young babies; on the
contrary, the tests go to show that they have a low taste sensibility.

The craving of hunger, of course, is an intense feeling in babies,
and its satisfaction (rather than taste pleasure) is greatly enjoyed;
but except just at the hungry moment, they pay far more attention to
looking, and hearing, and feeling than to eating. Our baby, after the
first edge of hunger was off, was always ready to desert the breast to
look at something interesting. She would nurse a little, then throw
herself back on her mother’s arm to smile up into her face. She cried
quite as hard over being obliged to lie down, where she could not look
around her, as over being hungry; and getting her meal caused no such
marked signs of pleasure as light and motion, the bath, and the free
use of her own powers.

Some babies are hungrier than ours was, and some are like her; but I
think close observation would show all alike more taken up with their
higher powers than with food. And as all alike put everything into
their mouths when they first learn to grasp, we must find some other
reason for the act than food association.

If we regard it as an exercise of the sense of touch, in what is at
the time the main touch organ, we have an activity closely parallel
with the constant interest in the use of sight in the early months.
Observers have been misled by failing to realize that the mouth, not
the hand, is the primitive touch organ. The baby behaves with the
things in his mouth as if he was interested in feeling them, not in
eating them. He does not try to swallow them (though he may be depended
on to do it without trying, if they are small), but licks, sucks,
mumbles them about, and in every way gets the utmost touch sensation
out of them. Preyer saw a look of pleasure caused by sucking a pencil,
before the baby had ever tasted food, when he could not have had the
least taste association with the feeling. There is plenty of evidence
that the act of sucking (the muscular sensation as well as that of
touch) is in itself highly agreeable to babies.

I have spoken of the great and active interest, at this time, in
studying the visible world. By the end of the fourth month the baby
had certainly learned the look of many things, and was well aware when
it was in any way changed. In a strange room she would renew the eager
and surprised staring about which had nearly ceased in familiar rooms;
and if one of us appeared in a bonnet she would look with curiosity and
interest at our changed aspect. She doubtless knew us all apart by this
time, though she gave no clear evidence of it, except in the case of
grandpa, whom she often greeted with cries of joy and flying hands.

From the middle of the fourth month she followed us constantly with her
eyes as we moved about. Her eyes were thus drawn to greater distances,
and her range of vision increased; before this she had hardly noticed
anything across the room. In the latter part of the month she looked
with especial curiosity at people’s faces on the other side of the
room, and I guessed that it was because they looked so much smaller
to her--as they would to us if we had not learned to allow for the
distance. A face fifteen feet away can be completely hidden by a fifty
cent piece held out at arm’s length; our friends shrink to small dolls
in our eyes every time they cross the room, but we bring them up to
their real size by trained imagination. The baby, who had not yet the
trained imagination, must have seen strange shrinkings and swellings as
people moved from her or toward her, and as she was carried about the
room.

She saw a complete change of appearance, too, each time any one turned
around, and each time she was carried from one side to another of a
person, or of a piece of furniture. We have become so used to this
that we do not notice it; but to the baby each side of an object must
have looked like an entirely new thing. I think it was some time
before she learned to associate together the different sides and the
different sizes of each object--all the aspects one chair could take,
for instance, gathering into one group in her mind, and all the aspects
a table or a person could take, into another; but she was learning. It
was an enormous piece of work for the baby brain, but babies are not
lazy, and she enjoyed it.

The changes that people went through, as they moved about, were much
more complicated than those of the furniture; but that only made them
the more interesting. No wonder that as soon as the baby knew she
could touch and feel what she saw, it was our faces she dived for
with especial zeal, to explore their surfaces with her mouth; and
a fortunate thing it is for the baby’s progress in knowledge that
mothers do not mind having great and moist liberties taken with their
faces. Our baby learned, too, at this time, with the connivance of her
grandfather, and afterward her father, to fix her fingers in their
beards and tug. This was doubtless educational, and it brought still
another interest into the number that gathered about the faces of her
fellow beings: but it led to trouble later, as her hands grew quicker
and stronger in clutching.

She was a joyous and sociable little being in those days, and while her
serious business was looking about and studying out the visible world,
or exploring with her mouth the feeling of things, her delight was as
always in people’s faces and attentions. She had become charmingly
responsive, and answered to nods and prattle and cuddling with the
gayest of smiles and crows, and lively flourishing of arms and legs.
From early in the month she acquired an ecstatic little chuckle, and
once or twice even broke into a genuine laugh when she was played with
a little more boisterously than usual.

For by this time, and more and more every week, she began to like a
frolic, and when she was tossed, rolled over, or slid down one’s knee,
she crowed and beamed and chuckled in high delight. She was such a
tiny baby for rough play that we tumbled her about most gingerly, but
she seemed ready for anything herself. She was a baby singularly free
from fear or nervous excitability, showing already quite clearly the
temperament she has carried through her later childhood.

She was also physically strong, and once or twice in the fourth month
sat quite alone on some one’s lap. I do not count this real sitting
alone, however, for the lap gives under the baby’s weight, and steadies
her a little: one should not record sitting alone till the baby has
balanced successfully on a hard level, the floor or table. But as far
as strength of back was concerned, our baby was now evidently ready to
sit alone.

At this stage the babies of grandpa’s line have always been seated on
the floor in a horse-collar, as befitted farm babies; and this latest
one went into the collar at four months old, like the rest of us in
our day, and spent much of her fifth month sitting there, sucking or
brandishing her rattle, and looking happily about her. It is really a
comfortable seat for a baby not yet quite ready to sit alone. When the
collar is not brand new, one will of course scrub and disinfect it; and
it is the better in any case for a blanket or thick shawl thrown over
it. Also of course, one will never set a baby on the floor without
seeing that all possible drafts, under doors or about loose window
casings, are shut off with shawls and screens. Otherwise, there may be
pneumonia to fight.

I have just spoken of the baby’s boldness. She showed fear now and
then, however. About the middle of the fourth month she cried while a
caller was present, dressed in black, with a large hat. Ten days later
she was quite upset when her father leaned over suddenly, bringing
his face into view from one side. Here were the first eye fears,
considerably later than ear fears.

A still more advanced form of fear appeared two days later. The baby
had waked and cried alone in the dark for some minutes, and when she
was at last taken up, she had evidently become frightened, and was not
easily reassured; she kept leaning toward her mother, and uttering
troubled cries, and as it was some minutes before her mother took her,
she grew more and more disturbed, and finally broke into a wail, and
was soothed with difficulty, and all the evening she was anxious and
easily upset. The next night, waking alone at the same hour, she began
again to cry with the note of fright.

Here was not yet fear in the sense of definite expectation of harm. It
was still purely instinctive, a sort of vague panic, from a sense of
unfamiliarity. The darkness no doubt contributed to this unfamiliarity,
but I do not think there was yet anything that could be called fear of
the dark. It is doubtless, however, in large part from such experiences
that fear of the dark is born; each one leaves its trace in the nervous
system, and associations of terror with darkness and solitude are
quickly formed. In these days of leaving babies to wail themselves to
sleep for the good of their souls, and the convenience of mamma’s going
out evenings, innumerable such associations must be bred--and again the
schoolbooks take the blame when in later days the child proves nervous
and excitable.

During the latter part of the fourth month, the baby was greatly
interested in making sounds, and the one that most delighted her was
a sort of harsh cawing or croaking, made deep in the throat, on the
vowel â. She would lie and utter this sound at intervals, by the half
hour, with deep satisfaction. But when she had not been making it for
some hours, she was apt to forget just how, and to get it too high or
low in the throat, producing an extraordinary collection of squeaks
and grunts. She usually hit it at last; but after repeated losings, it
became quite dissolved away among the many new ones it had apparently
given rise to.

Later, she took much pains over some imperfect lip sounds; she would
lie looking earnestly at me, draw her breath, gather her lips into
shape, and finally explode the sound with a great expenditure of breath.

She made her little sounds often with an air of friendly response
when we prattled to her, giving back murmurs, croaks, and gurgles
for words. From the latter part of the fourth month, if we imitated
to her some of these sounds, she seemed to imitate them back. Preyer,
who records the same thing of his boy at the same age, thinks it marks
a most important epoch, the beginning of action guided by ideas; but
Baldwin, who considers the beginning of imitation even more important
than Preyer does, thinks it cannot be so early, and that the repeating
of the sounds must be mere coincidence.

This is likely enough, for a baby is always repeating his pet sounds,
and it is not safe to conclude that he means to imitate us, even if
he does chance to give back the same sound after us several times.
But as to action guided by ideas, we scarcely need wait for the first
imitation to see that. It appears in a simple form when the baby first
looks for an object out of sight. This our baby had done weeks before,
and by this time many of her actions seemed to be of ideomotor type.
The effort to recall her croak was an instance. In the early weeks of
the fifth month, she would seem to think suddenly of one of her little
sounds, and dash at it, bringing it out with a comical doubling up of
her body. In the same way she would have the happy thought, “Fingers in
mouth!” and up they would come with a jerk, her head diving forward to
meet them.

In the nineteenth week, she seemed to act once from something like
a definite memory. Her grandfather entered the room while she was
in her bath, and her usual joyous up and down movement of arms at
sight of him produced a novel and fascinating splashing. Next day the
baby splashed without suggestion, and again the next, looking up to
my face and smiling; and after that no one could teach her anything
about splashing. Yet even this was probably not really memory, but an
association formed by a single vivid occurrence.

During these weeks a note of real desire, unheard before, appeared in
her voice. Her face had at times, when she saw something new, or when
she gazed at us while we talked to her, an expression of inquiry and
effort to comprehend, with lips drawn in and brow tense. No one could
watch her and not see the beginnings of some sort of mental life.




VIII

THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS


She sprang into this era suddenly, within four days. It was not
infrequently thus, and perhaps more and more as the little brain grew
complex. Some power that had been slowly developing would leap up into
completion, unlocking a dozen other doors of mental life. To put it
physiologically, some one new connection established between brain
cells would bring a whole network of others into coöperation--the more
easily as ancestral nerve paths seemed often to open up at a touch.

When the baby had passed ten days of her fifth month, she was still
grasping half mechanically. On the eleventh day, lying on her back, she
held her rattle above her and looked at it carefully. Her attention
had turned to the things that she grasped. She had come before to
the perception of a world of objects, but apparently only now to
the realization of it. And thereupon, that very day, I saw that she
was no longer using eyes and hands merely as means of getting mouth
sensations; she was holding objects, looking at them, and pulling them
about, for some moments, before they went to her mouth.

The pleasure of this handling seemed to be in the free movement of
the objects (seen and felt at the same time), not especially in the
touch sensations. When this new pleasure was exhausted, things went
to the mouth as before for the enjoyment of touch. It was long before
the fingers rivaled the lips in pure æsthetic touch enjoyment; perhaps
they never do, else the dandy would finger his cane knob, instead of
mouthing it, girls would smooth rose-leaves across their finger tips,
not their lips, and a kiss would have no higher rank than a hand-clasp.
But for grasping purposes the supremacy now passed promptly over to
the hands, and from this week the habit of grasping with the mouth by
head movements declined and disappeared.

In a few hours the baby was reaching for everything near her, and in
three days more her desire to lay hold on things was the dominant
motive of her life. Her grasping was still oftener with both hands than
one, and was somewhat slow, but always accurate. Some babies learn to
grasp more suddenly than she did, and often miss their aim; but with
her cautious method of bringing down her hands toward an object from
either side, penning it in between, she could hardly make errors. The
thing once corralled, she would pull it around, perhaps a minute, then
put it to her mouth.

It is an epoch of tremendous importance when the baby first, with
real attention, brings sight and touch and muscle feeling to bear
together on an object. “In a very deep sense,” says John Fiske,
“all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and
all human art is the increment of the power of the hand. Vision and
manipulation--these in their countless indirect and transfigured
forms are the two coöperating factors in all intellectual progress.”
And the first great result of this coöperation is the completion of
vision itself. It cannot be doubted that it is mainly by studying
objects with eye and hand together that we get our ability to see solid
form. A colt grasping his ear of corn with his teeth, even a puppy
licking and turning his bone all over, or a kitten tapping a spool to
and fro and hugging it in her paws, without losing sight of it--none
of these can bring the united powers of three senses to bear on an
object so perfectly as a monkey or human baby can, holding it in the
most convenient positions, turning it this way and that, seeing every
part, feeling it with finger tips and mouth; and it is doubtful if the
quadrupeds ever attain to as clear a sense of form as we do.

In these first days of the passion for grasping at things, the baby
reached for flat figures as readily as for solid objects; but (to look
ahead a little) she learned to discriminate with surprising ease, and
after the first week I have only three or four notes of her trying to
pick up such things as pictures on a page, roses on a quilt, shadows
in the sun. Yet I do not think this was because she gained quickly any
such sense of the difference between plane and solid form as we have,
but rather that she learned quickly to associate a certain look about
an object with the experience of being able to get hold of it.

The reason that I think so is that even weeks later, when she was six
months old, she showed signs of having no real ability to judge form
by the eye. At that age she turned a round cracker round and round at
her lips, trying to find the corner to bite, as she was used to doing
with square ones. And the only time she was ever taken in by a flat
figure afterward was when (at nine months old) she tried a long time to
capture the swaying shadow of a rope end on the deck of a yacht; things
that moved could always be taken hold of in her experience, and she
went solely by experience, not by any general ideas of form.

But such general ideas really require a good deal of development of
reason--so much that it is likely the lower animals never rise to them.
We must think of the baby’s seeing, therefore, as rounding out but
slowly to full equality with ours in such matters as estimates of form,
distance, and size, where much experience and some reason are required.

To go back to those swift four days in which the baby came into
realization of her power of using hands and eyes together,--they had
been preceded by a marked advance in the use of eyes alone (or jointly
with the sense of motion in being carried about) to get the relations
of things about her more clearly arranged in her mind. The day before
the baby held up her rattle to look at, she had declined to go to sleep
in her mother’s arms, and kept lifting her head to look at me, till
I crossed the room and put myself out of sight. Presently she lifted
her head again, turned round, and searched persistently the quarter
of the room toward which she had seen me disappear. She had gained
much in sense of direction and in association of ideas when she could
look along the line in which I had been seen to move moments before,
expecting to see me somewhere there.

Later, the same day, she sat in my lap, watching with an intent and
puzzled face the back and side of her grandmother’s head. Grandma
turned from her knitting and chirruped to her, and the little one’s jaw
dropped and her eyebrows went up with an expression of blank surprise.
Presently I began to swing her on my foot, and at every pause in the
swinging she would sit gazing at the puzzling head till grandma turned,
and nodded or chirruped to her; then she would turn away satisfied and
want more swinging.

Here we seem to get a glimpse of the process I have spoken of, by which
the baby gradually associates together the front and rear and side
aspects of a person or thing, till at last they coalesce together in
his mind as all one object. At first amazed to see the coil of silver
hair and the curve of cheek turn suddenly into grandma’s front face,
the baby watched for the repetition of the miracle till it came to seem
natural, and the two aspects were firmly knit together in her mind.

She began, too, to watch people’s motions carefully for long spaces of
time--all through the process of setting the table, for instance--with
a serious little face, and an attention so absorbed that it was
hardly possible to divert her if one tried (which one ought not to
do, for power of attention is a precious attainment, and people have
no business to meddle with its growth for their own amusement). When
her mother’s dark-eyed sister had a little reception in consequence
of having married the minister, baby was in the thick of it, watching
first the preparations, and then the comings and goings of people, with
the closest attention and the deepest enjoyment, cheerfully willing to
have her meals postponed, her nap broken, anything, if the fun would
only go on.

There was a decided advance, too, in her acquaintance with her own
body. Sitting as usual in her horse-collar, she was bending herself
back over it, a thing that she had done before; but to-day she kept it
up so persistently, and bent herself back with such exertion, that at
last the back of her head touched the floor. She righted herself with
an expression of great surprise. Evidently she had been experimenting
in new muscular sensations only, and (as happens to all experimenters
sometimes) had got an extra result that she did not bargain for and
did not understand. She bent back again, with her head screwed around
to see what had given her the touch. In this position, she did not
reach the floor. She sat up again, looked at me with a perplexed
face, and tried it over, a full dozen times, till her mother picked
her up to stop it, on the ground that the baby was more valuable than
the experiment, and that she would break her little back. For days,
however, the baby returned to the investigation, doubling herself back
over the arm of any one who held her till her head hung straight down,
or over the horse-collar till it rested on the floor.

We may perhaps fairly guess that in this incident she had for the
first time discovered the back of her head as a part of herself, and
any of us might well be surprised to find himself extending off behind
into space that way, if he had never known about it before. The baby
had of course felt daily and hourly touches on the back of her head,
from pillow and floor and lap, from cap and hair brush; but all her
previous behavior, and her surprise now, indicate that this was the
first time she had externalized these touches--which implies also the
first time she had felt _herself_ as receiving them.

One of the first things she did when she began grasping zealously was
to seize her own toes, and she bent her foot forward on the ankle to
bring it better in reach. This may have been a purely instinctive
coöperating act at first, but it helped on the control of feet and
legs, and the recognition of them as parts of herself--the more as they
were now for some time favorite playthings every time the baby was
undressed.

Another significant movement the next day, also brought about by the
advance in grasping, was the first attempt to scramble forward as she
lay on her stomach, to get hold of something--a futile effort, but the
forerunner of creeping.

These days of rapid unfolding were joyous days. The baby laughed aloud
more than ever before, and her daily frolics were as necessary to her
as her meals, and were fretted for as persistently if she did not get
them. The door of communion with fellow beings, too, was trembling
on its hinges, ready to come ajar. The little thing began to look up
into our faces as if for sympathy in pleasure or perplexity, as I
have mentioned in the case of her surprise at discovering the back of
her head; she did it laughing when she splashed in the bath, and with
smiles of satisfaction when she listened to the piano. When her mother
held out her arms to take her, she learned to put forward her little
hands in response; and on the same day she took up the instinctive
gesture of stretching out her arms toward an object in desire--always,
I suspect (records are wanting), the next gesture after turning
away the head. Neither of these reaching gestures was as yet used
intentionally to convey ideas, but both entered later into genuine sign
language. Both seem to grow naturally out of grasping movements.

In the baby’s absorption in grasping, most of her little sounds were
abandoned; but she clung to a favorite long gurgle, and used it with
an air of amiable response when people talked or nodded to her,
often kicking her legs in the air or flinging up her arms, by way
of emphasis. Sometimes she would look earnestly into your face and
address you with the gurgle in all seriousness. Sometimes it would seem
to occur to her suddenly, and she would burst out with it, with an
impulsive movement of body and limbs.

In a few days she had become a different baby, with a new world of
interests, and a wonderfully more varied and vivid life. After this,
she went on smoothly to the end of the fifth month (and for that
matter, through the sixth), absorbed in looking, feeling, and handling,
reaching this way and that to lay hold of everything she saw, and
improving steadily in skill. A small steel bell given her in the
twenty-first week was at first pulled and shoved about on the table,
picked up with two fingers or more as might chance, and put into her
mouth by any part that came handiest; but in three or four days it
was taken up properly and rung. More and more all the time she found
something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth.

She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and
preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing
less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored
worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite,
in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as
he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for
color, perhaps does not yet see it; and any dyes and worsted shreds
that can come off in wet little mouths are conclusive against such a
toy.

On the other hand, bright metal objects are apt in the course of their
gyrations to deal bad thumps to little heads and noses; so one must
compromise on rubber--uninteresting, but safe--and on such bone, metal
(perhaps aluminum), and unpainted wooden toys as can be trusted to give
only very mild thumps, such as a baby had better take now and then
rather than be deprived of all really interesting toys.

This is one of the many dilemmas in which the baby is lucky who has a
grandma, or whose mamma can spare time to associate with him a great
deal; for no end of things can be trusted in the little hands, that
ache for everything in sight, if only vigilant fingers hover close,
ready to ward gently off any dangerous movement. Sitting in one’s
lap at the table, too, the baby may push and pull at many things not
safe for him to lift; or he may be allowed to handle something safely
tethered with a string. Certainly the wider liberty of holding and
handling he can by any device be allowed, the better; the instinct is
very strong, and wholly healthy, and the thwarting of normal instincts
is not good for any one’s nerves or mind.

In sight, important changes were no longer to be looked for: except
possibly in the matter of color sense, the baby’s seeing had now
passed through all the stages of development, and needed only practice
and mental growth to become as perfect as it would ever be. She was
evidently still at work somewhat, especially in new places, in reducing
confused appearances to order; but so much of this work was already
done that more and more she could sit and enjoy the varied spectacle.
More than once she spent half an hour gazing thus out of the window
with quiet pleasure.

There were for the first time signs that she could distinguish between
the sounds of voices. She looked and listened one day in the middle of
the month, as if she noticed something unusual, when I was hoarse with
a cold. Late in the month, as I read to her mother while she nursed
the baby, singing softly to her (a frequent custom), the baby suddenly
raised her head and looked curiously at me, evidently for the first
time distinguishing the two voices as separate sounds.

Her mother and grandmother had been saying to her a great deal,
“Papa!” hoping to hasten her understanding of the word. This same day
she imitated the motion of the lips, and seemed to find the feeling
very funny, for she laughed, and laughed whenever she heard the sound
explosively uttered during the next fortnight; she stopped in the midst
of crying to laugh at it. Her amusement had not the faintest connection
with the meaning of the word; indeed, she chuckled aloud with even
more gayety when I ejaculated “poo-poo!” or “boo-boo!” instead. It was
something in the explosive labial sound that struck her as comical.

In this beginning of discrimination in articulate sounds, we see the
root of the later understanding of speech. But it was by another road
that the baby now began to move toward human communication: by the way,
that is, of signs and inarticulate cries. One day when she was four
and a half months old, she raised a strange little clamor on catching
sight of her grandfather, as if on purpose to call his attention, and
was satisfied when she got it; she began to hold out her arms of her
own accord, instead of merely to meet ours, held out to her; and in the
very last days of the fifth month she made a sound of request when she
wished to be taken, a whimpering, coaxing sound, leaning and looking
toward her mother, instead of the mere fretting sounds of desire,
addressed to nobody, which she had made for weeks.

When I have spoken before of the baby’s “addressing” her little noises
to us, I have not meant that there was really anything of language in
them. Some expression of interest in our presence, some sort of social
feeling, there must have been, but no more than in her kicking up her
feet or chuckling at our attentions. These first asking sounds and
motions, on the contrary, were beginnings of real language--not yet of
human language, but of such as the baby shares with all the beasts and
birds.

A sort of intelligence shared with the beasts and birds, too, appeared
in these same closing days of the fifth month--what may be called
“adaptive intelligence,” the use of means to an end--in the patient
devices by which the baby manœuvred her toe into her mouth; but this
was a sort of anticipation of a development that belonged really to the
next month, and so I shall leave the account of it to the next.

The increasing ownership of her body that this toe feat showed was
evident in several other ways. The baby’s sitting up grew imperceptibly
firmer and more independent of support: at nineteen weeks old, she was
sitting alone in our laps a quarter of a minute at a time; four days
later, a minute at a time, provided she did nothing to upset herself,
such as flourishing her arms, or reaching after things; two days later
yet, she balanced successfully for a few seconds on the table--and
this was real sitting alone at last, for on the table there could be no
least support from the yielding of the surface under her. All babies
can sit alone earlier on the lap or a cushion than on a perfectly flat,
hard surface.

At just about nineteen weeks old, too, the baby began to roll over to
her side when she was laid on her back on the floor, and to squirm and
bend around into a variety of positions, instead of lying where she was
put.

The period was coming to an end in which the main activity of
development was in the senses, and in coming through the coöperation of
the senses to a bodily consciousness of herself in a world of objects,
of distances, and directions. Now the baby had to learn to use that
body, and explore that world. But before this second great period of
activity fully began, there was a transition month, a month of vigorous
practice in the powers already gained, and of gathering forces for the
new developments.




IX

THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE


The sixth month, though it lay between two great development
periods,--that of learning to use the senses, and that of learning to
carry the body,--was not in itself a period of suspended development.
It is true that its progress, being more purely mental, could not be
so continuously traced as that which came before and after, but rather
cropped up to the surface every now and then in a more or less broken
way; still, no doubt, it really went on in the same gradual method, one
thread and another knitting together into the fabric of new powers.

It was to this month, as I said in closing the last chapter, that the
beginnings of adaptive intelligence belonged; and this alone marks it a
great epoch.

There is a great deal of discussion about the use of the words
“intelligence,” “reason,” “instinct,” “judgment,” “inference,” and the
like: what these faculties and acts really are, how they come about,
where the line is to be drawn between their manifestations (in the
minds of animals and of man, for instance), and many other problems.
But I think that all agree upon recognizing two types of action that
come under the discussion: one, that which shows merely the ability to
adapt means to ends, to use one’s own wit in novel circumstances; the
other, that which rests on the higher, abstract reasoning power, such
as is hardly possible without carrying on a train of thought in words.
Whether these two types are to be called intelligence and reason, as
Professor Lloyd Morgan calls them, or whether both come under the head
of reason, lower and higher, we need not trouble to decide. If we call
them adaptive intelligence and higher or abstract reason, we are safe
enough.

Even if it be true that any glimmer of the higher reason penetrates
back into the grades of life below the attainment of speech, it must
be only into those just below, and is not to be looked for in our baby
for a long time yet. But the mere practical intelligence that I am now
speaking of seems to appear in babies close on the completion of a fair
mastery of their senses, about the middle of the first year, and it
goes pretty far down in the animal kingdom. Darwin thought the lowest
example of it he knew was in the crab, who would remove shells that
were thrown near the mouth of his burrow, apparently realizing that
they might fall in.

Recent psychologists have shown strong reason for thinking that such
acts as this are at bottom only the same old hit and miss trick that
we have seen from the first, of repeating lucky movements; only in
a higher stage, as the associations that guide the movements become
more delicate and complicated, and memory and imagination enter in.
However this may be as a matter of theoretic analysis, there is in
practice a clear test of difference between the unintelligent earlier
type of actions and those that all agree in calling intelligent: I have
indicated it above, in saying that in intelligent action one’s own wit
must be used “in novel circumstances.” The case must be such that one
cannot fall back on race instinct nor on his own previous habit.

Our baby, for instance, first used her intelligence to steer her toe
into her mouth, and the way she did it, compared with the way she
slowly settled on the proper movements for getting her rattle into her
mouth, shows clearly the practical difference between unintelligent
and intelligent action, even if both are at bottom made of the same
psychological stuff.

It was just before the sixth month began that the baby accomplished
this feat, but it belongs with the developments of that month. She was
already fond of playing with her toes; and sitting unclad that evening
in her mother’s lap, she first tried to pull them straight to her
mouth. This was, of course, the mere repetition of a frequent movement,
learned by simple association. But when it failed--for the toes would
kick away, just as her arms used to do, carrying the thumb from her
lips--the little one put her mind on corralling them. She took them in
one hand, clasped the other hand about her instep, and so brought the
foot safely up. Still it escaped, and at last she clasped ankle and
heel firmly, one with each hand, and after several attempts brought the
elusive toe triumphantly into her mouth. It is true that by looking up
to us for sympathy in her success, and relaxing attention, she promptly
lost it once more; but she recaptured it, and from this time on, for
weeks, had immense satisfaction in it every time she was undressed.

There may have been a certain element of instinct in this--getting the
toe to the mouth is so persistent a habit with babies that it seems
as if there must be some inheritance about it; but inheritance could
hardly have given the special devices for managing the insubordinate
foot; there was clearly some use of individual intelligence. All
through the process of learning to manage the body, the baby showed
instinct and intelligence most intricately mingled; and, indeed, we do
so ourselves our lives long.

Of all a baby’s doings this toe business is the one that people find it
most impossible to regard with scientific seriousness. But its indirect
usefulness is considerable. The coöperation of different parts of the
body that it teaches is remarkable; and it must have great influence in
extending the sense of self to the legs and feet, where it has hitherto
seemed but weakly developed. This is important in getting the body
ready for standing and walking.

The baby now showed intelligence in her actions in several little ways,
such as tugging with impatient cries at her mother’s dress when she
wanted her dinner, and leaning over to pluck at the carriage blanket,
under which her mother had laid some flowers to keep them from her. She
slipped a long-handled spoon farther down in her hand to get the end of
the handle into her mouth (almost exactly the same act as the one that
Darwin thought first showed “a sort of practical reflection” in his
child at about the same age: the boy slipped his hand down his father’s
finger, in order to get the finger tip into his mouth). In the second
week of the month she began to watch things as they fell, and then to
throw them down purposely, to watch them falling.

I have already mentioned certain doubtful imitations in the fourth
month, and a clearer one in the fifth. Now the baby began to imitate
unmistakably. Her uncle had a fashion of slapping his hand down on the
table by way of a salutation to her, and one day (when she had passed a
week of her sixth month) she slapped down her little hand in return.
The next day as soon as her uncle came in, she began to slap her hand
down, watching him, delighted to repeat the movement back and forth, as
long as he would keep it up. She would imitate me also when I did it;
and in the course of the month several other little imitations occurred.

I have already spoken of the great importance psychologists attach
to imitation. Professor Baldwin makes it the great principle of
development in child and race--all evolution one long history of
its workings; but he uses the word in a far wider sense than the
ordinary one, tracing “imitation” from the mechanical repetition
of life-preserving motions by the lowest living things, up to the
spiritual effort of men and women to live up to their own highest
ideals. Even using the word in its ordinary sense, we know what a
potent force in the little one’s education imitation is. The age,
however, at which it is most efficient is considerably later than the
sixth month, and it did not count for much yet with our baby.

Her sounds had been more various and expressive from the first days
of the month. She had taken up a curious puppy-like whine of desire
or complaint, and a funny little ecstatic sniffing and catching her
breath, to express some shades of delight; and she had also begun to
pour out long, varied successions of babbling sounds, which expressed
content, interest, or complaint very clearly. She would “talk to” any
interesting object (a hedge in gorgeous bloom, for instance) with this
expressive babble, sometimes holding out her arms to it at the same
time. But now, in the second week of the month, the day after the
first decisive imitation, a surprising advance beyond these means of
communication took place.

I must explain that the wise grandma, who believed in encouraging
babies to creep, as the best possible preparation for standing and
walking, had begun to set the little one on her hands and knees on
the big dining-table, putting a hand against her feet as a brace in
case she should be moved to struggle forward. The baby had a habit of
pushing with her feet when she felt anything against her soles; and
pushing thus, thrust herself forward; and as the table-cover slid with
her movement, she would half slide with it, half shove herself, across
the table, grunting with exertion, and highly pleased.

On the day in question I was sitting with her by this table, and she
pulled at the table-cover, as she was wont to pull and handle anything
she could reach. Suddenly she threw herself back on my arm, and looked
earnestly in my face; sat up and pulled at the cover again, then threw
herself back and looked at me again.

“What does she want?” I said, surprised, and hardly able to think
that the little thing could really be trying to say something to me.
But grandma interpreted easily, and when I put the baby on the table
accordingly, to make her sliding sprawl across the surface, she was
satisfied.

This remarkable advance in sign language comes well under our
definition of intelligent action: it was not a stereotyped sign,
already fixed in her mind in association with a certain wish, like
holding out her arms to be taken, but a device of her own, to meet the
special occasion.

Her increased power of communication was not the only way in which
her mind showed itself more wide awake to other people. A rather
uncomfortable phase of this development was timidity. In the first
week of the month, she was frightened by some one who came in suddenly
between her and her mother, in a strange house, and spoke abruptly,
in a deep, unfamiliar voice; and after that she often cried or became
uneasy when strange men took her, or came near her, especially if they
were abrupt. She drew distinct lines, according to some principle of
her own, and certain people were affably accepted at once, while
others, no more terrific that we could see, made the little lip quiver
every time they came near. This timidity toward people was not at all
deeply fixed in her temperament, and though it lasted all this month,
it was never very marked afterward.

Some indications of the dawn of affection also appeared now. The baby’s
desire to touch our faces with her mouth and hands seemed to have a
certain element of attachment in it. The touches were often soft and
caressing, and they were bestowed only on her especial friends, or on
one or two strangers that she had taken at once into notable favor.
Once she leaned out of her baby carriage, calling and reaching to me,
as if she wished to be taken; but when I came to her, she wanted only
to get hold of me, to put her hands and mouth softly on my face.

Up to about the middle of the month, in spite of her daily exercises
with her toe, the baby had not altogether annexed her legs to her
conscious self and brought them under her orders. She still had to
hold the foot forcibly with her hands all the time her toe was in
her mouth, or it would have kicked away from her as if it was none
of hers. It is likely, too, that she had scarcely any idea of those
parts of her body which she could not see and did not often touch.
Indeed, the psychologists tell us that we ourselves have a decidedly
inferior bodily consciousness in such parts--say between the shoulder
blades. Even her own head must have been mainly unknown territory to
the baby still, in spite of the curiosity she had felt about it the
month before. But now she discovered by a chance touch that she could
investigate it with her hands, and proceeded at once to do so, with a
serious face.

In the latter half of the month, she went a good deal farther toward
getting a roughly complete knowledge and control of her body. She
investigated her ear, her cheek, and the back and sides of her head,
from time to time. She became quite expert in using legs and hands,
head and mouth, together, in get getting hold of her toe. She sat alone
longer and longer, and by the end of the month could have done so by
the half hour, if she had not always upset herself in five minutes or
so by turning and reaching about. She had become very free in bending,
squirming, and changing her position when she lay on the floor, and
early in the third week of the month she had turned clear over, from
back to stomach, in reaching after something. She followed up the
lesson at once, and soon was rolling over whenever she wished--at
first having much ado to get her arm disentangled from under her, but
managing it nicely before long.

It is possible she would have begun creep creeping at this time but for
the impediment of her clothes. She did stumble once upon almost the
right movement, in trying to get forward to something she wanted; but
her feet and knees became entangled in her skirts, and she gave it
up. A week later, she was put into short skirts, but by that time the
ability to roll over had diverted her mind from creeping.

Babies must lose a great deal of their normal activity through clothes.
They are retracing a stage of human history in which clothes had no
part, and this new element must hamper the repetition immensely.
Clothes they must wear--they do not live in tropic forests nor own hair
coverings; but we ought to leave the little limbs as free as we can
without risk from cold. A chance to roll about nude in a room that is
safely warm is a great thing for a baby.

She did not again use any sign language as advanced as when she had
asked to be put on the table; that incident was a sort of herald of a
later stage of development. But in the latter part of the month her
regular means of communication were decidedly better developed than in
the first part. She would coax for a frolic by leaning forward with
an urgent “Oo! oo!” and expressive movements of her body; but if she
was asking instead for an object she wished, or to be taken into her
mother’s arms, there were small but quite definite differences in tone,
expression, and movement, so that we usually knew at once which she
meant.

About a week before the end of the month a great step toward
intercommunication by speech took place. We began to suspect that the
baby knew her own name, she turned to look so often just after it had
been spoken. To test it I stood behind her, and in an ordinary tone
accosted her as Bobby, Tom, Kitten, Mary, Jacob, Baby, and all sorts of
other names. Whenever I said Ruth, Toodles, or Toots, she turned and
looked expectantly at me, but not at any other name. Now, Ruth is our
baby’s proper name; so it was evident that she really did have some
inkling of the sound that meant her.

Not that she could rise yet to any such abstract conception as that
of a person or of a name. But she had learned that this sound was
connected with interesting experiences--with frolics, and caresses, and
trips outdoors, with relief from discomforts, with dinners, and all the
other things that happened when people were attending to her. It was
out of such a beginning as this that full understanding of articulate
speech, in all its logical intricacy, was to develop.

One of the most marked traits of the latter weeks of this month was the
surprising rapidity with which things were grouping themselves in the
baby’s mind by association, in a way that came nearer and nearer to
definite memory. She coaxed for a spoon, and when she got it was still
discontented, till we found that she wished it to have milk in, as she
knew befitted a spoon--though for the milk itself she did not care at
all. She understood what particular frolic was to be expected from
each of us. She turned, when she saw reflections, to look for the real
object. She made demonstrations of joy when she saw her baby carriage,
knowing well what it portended.

In two or three cases, there was at last unmistakable evidence of true
memory, for at least a few minutes. For instance, in the last week of
the month, sitting on her mother’s lap, the baby caught sight of a knot
of loops that adorned the centre of an ottoman close by, and reached
her arms for it. By way of a joke on her, her mother set her on the
ottoman. It was quite beyond the baby’s sense of locality to divine
what had become of the knot, and she looked all about her diligently to
find it, leaning this way and that. By and by her mother took her back
into her arms to nurse; but all the time she was nursing, she would
stop now and then, sit up, and lean over to look for the lost knot.

At another time, when her mother came into the room with a new hat on,
she reached out her hands for it with delight; her mother retreated
at once, and put the hat safely out of sight, but when some minutes
later the baby saw her again, her first look was at the top of her
head, and seeing it now bare of lace and buttercups, she broke into a
disappointed whimper.

All this time practice in her earlier attainments went vigorously
on. She was watching, handling, reaching after things, all day long.
Especially she watched all the movements of people; often, now, as they
went in and out of doors, as they were seen through windows, came into
sight or disappeared around corners. She must have been getting thus
some idea of the way walls acted in shutting out her view, and of the
relation of visible and invisible positions.

She had perhaps more troubles in this month than ever before, what with
some fear of people, and the discomforts connected with her first pair
of teeth, and also with the beginning of the weaning period. There
were a number of days when her health and spirits were considerably
depressed, and there was a good deal of fretting. When the teeth were
fairly through, and the insufficient food supplemented, her spirits
came up with a bound, and she was more joyous than ever.

She had her first skin pain in this month--a scratched finger from a
clasp on my shoulder--and wailed with vigor; yet it was forgotten in
a few moments, and never thought of again. It was evident that skin
sensitiveness was still low, and that hurts left no after soreness.

It was about ten days before the end of the month that she first showed
a decided emotional dependence on her mother. She had been separated
from her for some time (by a tedious dentist’s engagement), had become
hungry and sleepy, and had been frightened by an abrupt stranger. At
last she settled into a pitiful, steady crying--stopping at every angle
in the corridor where I walked with her, and watching eagerly till it
was turned, then breaking out anew when her mother did not prove to be
around the corner. This tragic experience left a much deeper mark than
the physical woes, and for some days the baby watched her mother rather
anxiously, as if she feared she might lose her again unless she kept
her eyes constantly upon her.

And so she was come to the end of her first half year. The breathing
automaton had become an eager and joyous little being, seeing and
hearing and feeling much as we do, knowing her own body somewhat, and
controlling it throughout to a certain extent, laughing and frolicking,
enjoying the vision of the world with a delicious zest, clinging to
us not so much for physical protection as for human companionship,
beginning to show a glimmer of intelligence, and to cross over with
sign and sound the abyss between spirit and spirit.




X

BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION


When a baby has learned to see things clearly, and has known the joys
of handling them, it is natural that he should soon come to feel the
need of getting to them when they chance to lie beyond arm reach.
Apparently the first impulse to move the whole body does always come
from this desire to get at something; but I doubt if this remains a
very important motive throughout the whole process of learning. There
is so much in that process that is instinctive that the baby seems to
be in great part taken up and carried on by a current of blind impulse.
Then, too, the whole structure of bone, and joint, and muscle is so
fitted to certain positions and movements that in the mere chance
exercising of his limbs he is steadily brought nearer to the great
race acts of balance and locomotion.

One might suppose that with babies sprawling, creeping, and toddling
on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the beginnings of human
locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage that precedes walking
is involved in a good deal of confusion. Records are scanty, and
children seem to vary a good deal in their way of going at the thing.
Most of them “creep before they gang”; but there seems to be a stage
before creeping, when, if the child is given full freedom of movement,
he will get over the floor in some cruder way, rolling, hitching,
dragging himself by the elbows, humping forward measure-worm fashion,
or wriggling along like a snake. Perhaps, as I have already suggested,
this is because skirts delay the natural beginning of creeping, and
these other movements require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there
is some deeper reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby
makes these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired,
and never creeps at all.

Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective
attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face
down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and knees
that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping unawares.
But soon after she was six months old, she discovered the other half of
the trick of rolling--reversing herself from front to rear as well as
from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged freedom that it
stopped all aspirations in other directions.

She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She simply
rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt like it
or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and asking odds
of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction a number of
times in succession, she would drift halfway across the room, meeting
no end of interesting things by the way--mamma’s slipper tips, chair
rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped from the vases, and
so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and kept her happy for six
or seven weeks.

During this time, her balance in sitting grew secure, so that she could
sit on the floor as long as she chose, occupied with playthings; but
she cared more for the rolling.

It was in these weeks, too, that two great new interests came into
our baby’s life. The first was a really passionate one, and it seized
her suddenly, the week after she was half a year old. The door had
just opened to admit a guest, amid a bustle of welcome, when a cry
of such desire as we had never heard from our baby in all her little
life called our attention to her. Utterly indifferent to the arrival
of company (she who had always loved a stir of coming and going, and
taken more interest in people than in anything else!) she was leaning
and looking out of the window at the dog, as if she had never seen him
before--though he had been before her eyes all her life. She would
think of nothing else; the guest, expert in charming babies, could not
get a glance.

Day after day, for weeks, the little thing was filled with excitement
at sight of the shaggy Muzhik, moving her arms and body, and crying
out with what seemed intensest joy and longing. When he came near, her
excitement increased, and she reached out and caught at him; her face
lighted with happiness when he stood close by; she showed not the least
fear when he put his rough head almost in her face, but gazed earnestly
at it; she watched for him at the window, or from her baby carriage. No
person or thing had ever interested her so much. Muzhik, on his part,
soon learned to give the snatching little hands a wide berth; and his
caution may have enhanced his charm.

Later in the month, she showed somewhat similar excitement at sight of
a cow. About the same time, too, she first noticed the pigeons as they
flew up from the ground.

This was the beginning of a lasting interest in animals, animal
pictures, animal stories. It is not easy to account fully for this
interest, appearing in such intense degree, at so early an age. All
children show it to some extent, though in many it is mingled with a
good, deal of fear. One is tempted to connect both the fear and the
interest with race history--the intimate association of primitive
man with animals; but a six-month baby is traversing a period of
development far earlier than that of the primitive hunter. Professor
Sully has some good suggestions about the sympathy between children
and animals, but these, too, fail of application to a baby so young.
Probably to her the main charm was the movement, the rough resemblance
to people, joined with so many differences, now first noticed with the
interest of novelty--and (as later incidents made me suspect) the
quantity of convenient hair to be pulled.

The other new interest waked late in the seventh month: that joy in
outdoors that was for many months of the little one’s life her best
happiness. Up to this time, she had liked to be taken out in her
baby carriage, but mainly for the motion. Now, one morning, grandma
took her and sat down quietly on the veranda, saying that she wanted
her to learn to love the sunshine, the birds and flowers and trees,
without needing the baby carriage and its motion. The little one sat
in her lap, looking about with murmurs of delight; and after that, her
happiness in rolling about freely was much greater when we spread a
blanket on veranda or lawn, and laid her there. Within two weeks, she
would coax to be taken outdoors, and then coax till she was put down
out of arms, and left to her own happiness. She would roll about by the
hour, the most contented baby in the world, breaking occasionally into
cries and movements of overflowing joy.

I did not think that at this age the novel sights and sounds outdoors
had much to do with her pleasure; she did not yet notice them much. Nor
could it have been the wideness and freedom of outlook, for she had not
yet come to distant seeing--a hundred feet was as far as I had ever
seen her look. Later, all this counted; but now I thought that the mere
physical effect of activity in the fresh air, together with the bright
light, and perhaps the moving and playing of lights in the leaves, must
make up most of the charm.

In the early weeks of the seventh month idle baby’s rollicking spirits
were striking; in fact, she became for a time quite a little rowdy,
ho-ho-ing and laughing in loud, rough tones, snatching this way and
that, clutching at our hair with exultant shouts and clamor. In the
latter part of the month, her manners were better--indeed, it was fully
a year before I saw them as bad again; but she was much given to
seizing at our faces, flinging herself at them with cries and growls
(exactly as if she had been playing bear), and mouthing and lightly
biting them. And indeed it must be confessed that while our baby’s
behavior was often very pretty for weeks together, she had many fits
of rough play and hoydenish spirits, and our faces and hair were never
quite safe from romping attacks before she was two years old. This
boisterousness was not overflowing spirits (real joyousness showed
itself more gently) and I could never trace its psychological origin.

At intervals during the month, she continued to improve her bodily
knowledge of herself, investigating her head and face and even the
inside of her mouth, with her fingers; she rubbed her forefinger
curiously with her thumb; she ran out her tongue and moved it about,
trying its motions and feeling her lips. And the very first day of
the month there had appeared that curious behavior that we call
“archness” and “coquetting” in a baby (though anything so grown up
as real archness or coquetry is impossible at this age), looking and
smiling at a person who was somewhat strange, but very amusing, to
her, then ducking down her head when he spoke, and hiding her face on
her mother’s shoulder. Whatever the real reason of such behavior may
be, there is plainly self-consciousness in it. So, too, when, at seven
months old, she began to try deliberately to attract the interest of
callers, wrinkling up her nose with a friendly grimace till they paid
attention to her.

Both these forms of self-consciousness were common after this. Neither
is what we could call human or rational self-consciousness. Any dog or
kitten will show them. But they certainly are something more than mere
bodily feeling of self. If we need a name for it, we might call it a
beginning of _intelligent self-perception_, as distinguished both from
bodily self-feeling, and rational self-knowledge--in which the mind,
years later, will say to itself clearly, “This is _I_.”

We now began to suspect (as she ended her seventh month) that the baby
was beginning to connect our names with us; and when we tried her by
asking, “Where is grandpa?” or “mamma” or “aunty,” she really did look
at the right one often enough to raise a presumption that she knew what
she was about. The association of name and person was still feeble
and shaky, but it proved to be real. In a few days it was firm as to
grandpa (who was quite _persona grata_, because he built up blocks for
her to knock down, and carried her about from object to object, to let
her touch and examine); and in a week or two as to the rest of us.

Professor Preyer complains of teaching babies mere tricks, which have
no real relation to their development; and certainly it is a sound rule
that self-unfolding, not teaching, is the way in which a baby should
develop in the earliest years. But Preyer’s baby learned to wave his
hand, and play “patacake,” and show “How big is baby?” and the rest of
it, just as other babies do; mammas and nurses cannot resist it. And as
long as the babies like it, I do not see that it can do any harm, if it
is not overdone. Besides, it may be said that these standard tricks are
all closely related to the sign language, and so fall in well with the
natural development at this stage. And again, the extreme teachability
of the human child is his great superiority over the brute--all our
civilization rests on it; and when the time comes that he is capable of
receiving training, it may be as well that his power of doing so should
be used a little, and that these simple gesture tricks of immemorial
nursery tradition are good exercises to begin with. It is possible to
make a fetich of “self-development,” beyond all common sense.

At all events, as our baby approached seven months old, her mamma had
begun to teach her to wave by-by. For a couple of weeks, the mother
would hold up the little hand and wave it at the departing guest, and
before long the baby would give a feeble waggle or two after her mother
had let go; next, she would need only to be started; and a week after
she was seven months old she waved a spontaneous farewell as I left the
room. There was a long history of the gesture after that, for it was
lost and regained, confused with other hand tricks and straightened
out, and altogether played a considerable part in the story of sign
language and of memory, which I shall not have time to relate. But
at all times it paid for itself in the delight it gave the baby: it
reconciled her to almost any parting, and even to going to bed.

Her objection to going to bed, which had been evident since the fifth
month, was because she thought sleeping was a waste of good playtime,
not because she had any associations of fear and repugnance connected
with it. She had never been left to cry herself to sleep alone, but was
rocked and sung to in good old fashion. But she did show signs at this
time of timidity and distress in waking from sleep, clinging piteously
to her mother and crying. She had waked and cried alone a number of
times, and, as I have already said, she seemed to have formed some
associations of fear in this way. But I think there were deeper reasons
for the confused distress on waking, which from now until halfway
through the third year appeared at times.

I have spoken several times of the ease with which even we grown people
lose our sense of personal identity; and changes in brain circulation
make such confusions especially likely at first waking from sleep. With
babies, whose feeling of identity is but insecurely established, this
must be much more common; moreover, a baby’s conditions of breathing
are less regular than ours, and it is probable that as he comes out of
sleep, and the circulation and respiration of the waking hours slowly
reestablish themselves, he has all sorts of queer, lost feelings. I was
pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in the next two years, that she
struggled back to the firm shores of waking consciousness through dark
waters of confusion, and needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I
suspect, is the secret of the wild crying in the night, which doctors
call “night terror”: it is not terror, I think, but vague distress,
increased by the darkness--loss of self, of direction, of all one’s
usual bodily feeling.

In these sensitive states attending sleep it is likely that some of
the emotional conditions for life are formed, and the ties between
mother and child knit firmest. My observation is that the one the baby
loves most is the one that sleeps close by, that bends over him as he
struggles confusedly back to waking, and steers him tenderly through
the valley of the shadow of sleep; and next, the one that plays most
patiently and observantly with him--not the one that feeds him.

In her absorption in her growing bodily activity, the baby had taken no
marked steps in intellectual development, though in skill of handling,
and in ability to understand what went on about her and put two and two
together, she made steady progress. Early in the eighth month, some
definite instances of this appeared. She showed a discreet preference
at bedtime for anybody rather than her mother, and clung vigorously
round my neck or her grandfather’s when that messenger of fate came for
her. She dropped things to watch them fall, with a persistent zeal and
interest such as she had not shown in earlier experiments of the sort.
She knew what it meant if one of us put a hat on, and pleaded with
outstretched hands and springing motion to go too. Once she found that
in moving a long stick she was moving some twigs at its farther end,
and kept up the experiment with curiosity.

It was about this time--the first fortnight of the eighth month--that
taste first became a source of pleasure to our baby. She had been given
an experimental taste of several things before, but beyond the grimace
of surprise (it looks like utmost disgust, but there seems no doubt
that it really means surprise only) with which little babies greet
new tastes, she had shown no great interest in them. Now, as nature’s
supply grew scant, she was introduced more seriously to several
supplementary foods, and at least once rejoiced over the taste a good
deal. Still, she was apt soon to tire of them, and on the whole taste
did not at any time in her first year take a large place among her
interests.

As the middle of the eighth month approached, it was evident that an
advance in power of movement was coming. The baby was getting up on
hands and knees again; she made daily a few aimless creeping movements;
and in her bath she would draw herself to her knees, and partly to her
feet, holding by the edge of the tub, and somewhat supported by the
water. A few days later she drew herself forward a few inches, flat on
her stomach, to get something. But she still did not catch the idea of
creeping, and rolling remained her great pleasure for another fortnight.

In this fortnight, which brought our baby to eight months old, the
rolling grew very rapid and free. She would now roll over and over
in the same direction, not to get anywhere in particular (she never
learned to use rolling for that purpose), but just for fun. She
varied the exercise with the most lively kicking--heels raised in air
and brought down together with astonishing vigor and zest; and with
twisting about and getting on hands and knees, or even on hands and
feet, prattling joyously, and having a beautiful time all by herself,
for as long as the authorities would leave her alone. I have no note or
memory that she ever tired of it, or asked for attention or change; it
was always some one else who interfered, because meal-time or nap-time
or something had come.

In the last week of the month she learned to raise herself to a sitting
position; and as she could now sit up or lie down at will, she tumbled
about the floor with still more variety and enjoyment. In the same week
she began to pull herself daily quite to her feet in the tub. It was
an ordinary wooden wash-tub which was bridging the interval between
her own outgrown one and the grown-up bath-tub; and she would stand,
leaning her weight partly on her hands, on the edge of the tub, with
her feet planted wide apart, quite on the opposite side, giving her a
pretty secure base.

In this fortnight the baby’s understanding of us and feeling of
nearness to us were noticeably greater. Her attachment to her favorites
was striking. She would cling to us with all the strength of her little
arms, sometimes pressing her lips against our faces in a primitive
sort of kiss. Her desire for our attention was intense--little arms
stretched out, face full of desire, while she uttered urgent cries. Now
and then she was entirely unwilling to eat a meal till the person she
had set her heart on at the moment had yielded to her pleading, and
come to sit close beside her, for company.

She understood one or two little directions--“by-by,” and “patacake”;
or, at least, associated them with the acts. She had some idea of what
“No, no!” meant, and she knew perfectly that she must not keep paper
or flower petals in her mouth, and after biting off a bit would put
out her tongue, laughing, to have the forbidden scrap removed. And one
day when I said to her, “Don’t you want to come to aunty?” without any
gesture, she surprised me by leaning forward and putting out her hands
to me, exactly as if I had reached my arms out for her. She could not
have understood the whole question, for she hardly understood words
at all at the time; but she must have made out “come,” and, putting it
with “aunty,” which she had known for weeks, got at my meaning.

On the day she was eight months old, at last, the baby half sprawled,
half crept, forward to get something. The early, aimless stages of
locomotion were over, and she was about to start in in good earnest to
learn to creep and to stand.




XI

CREEPING AND STANDING


Now, at eight months old, began a fortnight of rapid development in
movements, all branching out from the position on hands and knees which
the baby often took as she sprawled on the floor.

First she hit on two ways of sitting up, beginning on hands and knees.
One of them, in fact, had appeared in the last days of the preceding
month. She would tilt over sidewise till she was half sitting, leaning
on one hand, then straighten up, raising the hand--and there you are,
sitting. The other way, a few days later, was to begin as before on
hands and knees, separate the knees, and lift herself over backward
till she was sitting, turning the legs out at the knee. No grown person
but a contortionist could do it, for our hips have not enough play
in the socket to carry the movement through the last inch or two; but
babies’ joints are flexible. This became our baby’s regular method, and
the position it left her in--legs spread out before her, bent directly
out at the knee--was her every-day one for many months. Most babies, I
believe, sit monkey fashion--legs straight, with soles turned in.

Watching carefully, we were sure that the baby did not at first use
either method intelligently; she wanted to sit up, and shifted and
lifted her body, scolding with impatience, and never knowing whether
she would bring up in the desired position or not, till she found
herself by luck where she wanted to be. In a few days, however, the
right movements were sifted out from the useless ones, and she sat up
and lay down at will.

In the same early days of the ninth month, another movement came of
experimenting while on hands and knees--a backward creeping, pushing
with the hands. The baby at once tried to utilize it to get to people
and things, and it was funny to hear her chattering with displeasure as
she found herself borne off the other way--backing sometimes into the
wall, and pushing helplessly against it, like a little locomotive that
had accidentally got reversed. She soon gave up trying to get anywhere
by this “craw-fishing,” however, and then she enjoyed it, merely as
movement.

The only reason I have heard suggested for this curious back-action
creeping (which is not uncommon just before real creeping) is that the
baby’s arms are stronger than the legs, and as a pushing movement with
them is more natural than a stepping one, a backward impulse is given,
which the baby, as a rule, resents with comical displeasure.

Next, from hands and knees the baby learned to rise to hands and
feet; to kneel, and then to sit back on her heels; and to make sundry
variations on these positions, such as kneeling on one knee and one
foot, or sitting on one heel, with the other foot thrust out sidewise,
propping her.

In spite of two or three chance forward steps, she was eight and a half
months old before she hit at last on real creeping; then one day I saw
her several times creep forward a foot or two, and presently she was
rolling an orange about and creeping after it. I tried in vain to lure
her more than a couple of feet, to come to me or to get a plaything;
she would creep a step or two, then sit back on her heels and call me
to take her. Until almost the end of this month, indeed, she would
creep for but very short distances, and always to reach something, not
for pleasure in the movement.

But while she fumbled in such chance fashion towards creeping, she
was carried on towards standing by strong and evident instinct.
She pulled herself up daily, not to reach anything, but from an
overwhelming desire to get to her feet; and when she found herself on
them she rejoiced and triumphed. At this stage she almost invariably
used a _low_ object to pull up by, so that she could lean over it,
propping her weight with her hands--or with one hand, as she grew
more confident. It was after the middle of the month that she first
drew herself up, her knees shaking, by a chair, to reach a favorite
plaything; but thereafter chairs became her great “stand by,” in a very
literal sense.

In kneeling, too, she showed joy. She could not keep her balance on her
knees for more than a few seconds, but while she did she exulted in the
exploit, and patted and waved her hands in glee. Aside from standing
and kneeling, her advances in movement were made with a curious lack of
intelligent consciousness of what she was about, as well as of clear,
compelling instinct. She seemed to progress by blind experimenting,
selecting gradually out of a medley of others the acts and positions
that were most useful and best fitted to the structure of her joints
and muscles.

Many babies before this stage show the walking instinct quite clearly.
If they are held from above, so that their soles press lightly on a
flat surface, the legs will begin to make good stepping movements. Our
baby had failed to make this response hitherto; in this fortnight,
however, it appeared, very imperfectly and irregularly, but steadily
better; and with another week she took great delight in the exercise.

Amid all these new movements, rolling rapidly declined and disappeared.
The baby was absorbed in her new powers, and during the latter half of
the month her joy in them was exquisite. She was a thing to remember
for a lifetime as she played on a quilt spread on the lawn in the hot
June days--sitting and looking about her with laughter and ejaculations
of pleasure, gazing up with wonder and interest at the branches swaying
in the warm breeze, watching the dog, creeping about and examining
the grass with grave attention, pulling to her feet at our knees as
we sat by with our reading and sewing. And when we let her take the
benefit of the warm weather, and creep about the floor stripped to the
inmost layer of garments, arms and legs bare, she was at the height of
joy. She would go from one position to another, sitting and kneeling,
tumbling and scrambling and creeping about in endless content.

That she paid her price for all this in increased knowledge of pain
I hardly need say. From the time she began to roll freely, she had
collided with table legs and the like; and from then until she could
walk, bumps and scratches and pinches were almost daily experiences.
Her early creeping was so awkward that she would lose her footing, so
to speak, and come down hard on her face, and her later and quicker
creeping brought collisions; in standing by chairs she would lose hold
and topple over; and in investigating rockers, window blinds, lids, and
all manner of things, she did not fail to get her fingers hurt now and
then, in spite of all vigilance.

In the main, she was surprisingly indifferent to these mishaps; even
when the blow had reddened the skin, she would look sober only a
minute, then, at a laugh and encouraging word, would smile and go on
with her play. This was doubtless partly temperament: babies cry with
nervous fright more than with the actual pain of a bump, and she was a
baby of tranquil nerves. But her skin sensitiveness was probably still
low.

With experience of pain, either her sensitiveness or her timidity
grew, and she made more fuss than she did at first; and over some
especially severe hurts she screamed with lusty good-will. Still, it
was noticeable on the whole how little she was troubled in learning to
balance and move about by the pains that strewed the way; and this, I
think, must be the normal condition with healthy children.

I have spoken just now of the pride and joy that were shown over
kneeling and standing. The joy, of course, was an old story: we have
seen that every stage of advancing power had been accompanied by
lively pleasure. But this feeling of pride, this exultation in herself
as actor, was a new emotion, and quite characteristic of the higher
type of self-consciousness the baby had entered on at about seven
months old, as I have already related. In going through her little
hand movements, too, she showed much consciousness and pride, looking
prettily into our faces for approval, as she patted or waved her hands.

As the baby now approached nine months old, there was an indescribable
dawning appearance of comprehension about her--an air of understanding
her surroundings and getting into touch with our minds. She watched our
movements not merely with curiosity, but with an apparent attempt to
interpret them, sometimes with a curious, puzzled drawing of the mouth
that looked like mental effort. Many things she did interpret perfectly
well: for instance, if I picked a rose and held it up, smiling, she
knew that it was for her, and broke into jubilation accordingly. She
volunteered to play peekaboo from early in the month, holding up a
cloth, basket lid, or whatever she had at hand, before her face, and
peeping out with smiles. She made intelligent little adaptations in her
own actions, such as pulling at the tablecloth to bring to her a paper
that lay on it.

She seemed, by the latter part of the month, to understand vaguely a
good deal that was said to her, when it was accompanied with a gesture.
If I said, “Kiss aunty,” and offered my cheek, she would press her lips
against it. She would look around to see if her mother shook her head
with “No, no!” when she crept up to pull at the books on a low shelf.
Her little list of accomplishments, waving and patting her hands, and
so on, she would go through at the mere word, without any gesture.

One important development in the latter part of the month was a
little imitative cry, something like mewing, associated with the
cats--important because of its bearing on the beginnings of language.
It has long been a dispute whether language began with imitation of
the sounds of nature, or with spontaneous ejaculations--“the bow-wow
theory and the pooh-pooh theory,” as they were scoffingly nicknamed
early in the course of the discussion. Our baby may seem to have given
the weight of her authority to the bow-wow theory, for this mewing cry
did in fact slowly develop months later into a name for “cat,” and
might be called the first remote foreshadowing of a spoken word. But on
the whole, with her and with other babies, the early stages of speech
confirm the best recent opinion--namely, that language is a complex
product, into which both imitation and ejaculation enter, with perhaps
still other elements.

About a week before the baby was nine months old, some one looked up
from dinner and saw her standing by a lounge, steadied only by one
hand pressed against it, while she waved the other in exultant joy. Her
father sprang and caught her as she toppled, then set her on her feet
within the circuit of his arms, but without support, for a few seconds.
Her legs shook, but she stood without fear, in high delight.

After this, her standing at chairs grew rapidly freer and bolder, and
the support she needed was daily less. At nine months old, she was
absorbed in the desire to stand. She would hold on with one hand and
lean down to pick up things with confidence and freedom. In the first
week of the tenth month, she even liked to pull herself up to her feet,
then deliberately let go, come down sitting with a thud, and look up
laughing and triumphant. She evidently thought the coming down quite as
fine an exploit as the getting up.

By this time she crept freely and rapidly, laughing with pleasure as
she did so. If she was laid on a blanket on the lawn, she no longer
tumbled about contentedly within its area, but struck off across the
grass, stopping to investigate carefully any plant or fallen leaf she
came across. The medley of positions and movements had disappeared, and
creeping and standing, as the fittest, had survived.

Within a week after she was nine months old, the baby began to get up
to her feet by low objects, and then, instead of stooping over them,
to abandon all support, straighten up, and stand alone for several
seconds, greatly pleased with herself. Next she could stand a minute at
a time, with such slight support as a fold of a gown in her hand, or
in a corner, steadied only by her shoulders against the wall. She no
longer plumped down to the floor, but lowered herself cleverly--once
(in the second week of the month) without any support at all, having
absent-mindedly let go of the chair. In a few days more, it was not
uncommon for her to forget to hold on, and to stand a few seconds alone
by a chair; and if she was at some one’s knee, where she felt more
confidence, she would let go on purpose, and try deliberately to stand
alone.

Now began a period of diligent self-training in standing. As I sat on
the grass and the baby played beside me, she would put her hands on
my knee, lift herself to her feet, and balance on them as long as she
could--seven seconds at the most, in the second week of the month, a
quarter of a minute in the third, if her attention was called away from
her own balance by some interesting sight. She would totter, stretch
out her arms to recover her balance, circle with them just as we do
(the movement must be highly instinctive), come down with a jolt and
a peal of baby laughter, scramble to my knees, and up again. People
are foolish to go to the matinée for amusement if they have a chance,
instead, to sit flat on a lawn on a summer day, and assist at a baby’s
standing lessons.

In these days there was evident again an intangible but great increase
in the little one’s mental alertness, her eager curiosity in following
our movements, her look of effort to understand, her growing clearness
in grouping associations and interpreting what she saw.

Her handling of things had long developed into elaborate investigation,
turning an object over and examining every side, poking her fingers
into crevices, opening and shutting lids, turning over the leaves of
books; and now she was no longer satisfied with investigating such
objects as she came across by chance--she began to have a passion
(which increased for weeks and months, and long made up a great part
of her life) to go and find what there was to see. She crept to the
window and stood at the low sill, to look out, beating the pane with
her soft little hands and laughing in an ecstasy of delight if the dog
wandered by. She crept into the hall and explored it, sitting down in
each corner to take a survey, and to look up the walls above her. Her
toys were neglected; she was impatient of being held in arms, and eager
only to get to the floor and use her new powers. She crept happily
about for hours from chair to chair, from person to person, getting to
her feet at each, and setting herself cleverly down again; smiling and
crowing at each success, and coming to us for applause and caresses.
She did not want to leave the floor for her meals, and was reconciled
to them only if she might stand at her mother’s side and take her milk
or porridge in small doses, interspersed with play. She ran away from
us on hands and knees, laughing, if she thought we were about to pick
her up.

Outdoors her happiness was even greater than in the month before,
and her cries of rapture as she looked up, down, and around, and
realized her own activity in the midst of all the waving and shining
and blooming things, were remarkable--uttered, as it were, from the
very deeps of her little soul, with that impassioned straining of the
central muscles by which a baby throws such abandon of longing or
ecstasy into his voice. We seem to have lost the vivid expressiveness
of primitive cries in getting the precision and convenience of
articulate words.

The sights and sounds of outdoors now contributed greatly to the little
girl’s joy there. She had for some weeks noticed sounds more than ever
before--the tapping of a woodpecker, for instance, or the stamping of
a horse in the stable--and now she was quick to look and listen at the
note of a bird. She watched the birds, too, for the first time, as they
flew from tree to tree; and the profuse California flowers were objects
of incessant desire and pleasure.

The power of communication was considerably increased in this month
by the acquisition of one exceedingly useful sign. The way in which
it was developed is an interesting example of the evolution of such
signs. First the baby began to use her forefinger tip for specially
close investigations; at the same time she had a habit of stretching
out her hand towards any object that interested her--by association,
no doubt, with touching and seizing movements. Combining these two
habits, she began to hold her forefinger separate from the others when
she thus threw out her hand towards an interesting object; then, in
the second week of the month, she directed this finger alone towards
what interested her; and by the third week, the gesture of pointing was
fairly in use. She pointed to the woodshed door, with her mewing cry,
when she wished to see the kittens; to the garden door, with pleading
sounds, when she wished to be taken thither; to the special bush from
which she wished a rose. She pointed in answer, instead of merely
looking, when we asked, “Where is grandpa?” “Where is Muzhik?”

These questions can hardly have been understood, as questions; but it
was more than ever clear that she got some idea from a good deal that
we said, and now by the words alone, without the help of gestures.
Doubtless she knew several simple words--words of coming and going, of
food, of the kittens and the dog and the horse.

All this time she had shown no great improvement in walking movements
when held from above, and she had no particular ambition to walk. But
in the last week of the month she began to edge along by the side of a
chair, holding to it--a great advance.

The first attempts at climbing, too, appeared before she was quite
ten months old. In the third week of the tenth month the baby had
let herself down by her hands quite cleverly from a large chair in
which she had been scrambling about--a feat that must have been quite
instinctive, since she did it well and easily at the first try. The
last day of the month, as she hovered at the foot of the stairs (a
region about which she had much unsatisfied curiosity), some one
helped her to put her knee on the lower step. Thereupon she laid hold
on the next one, and pulled herself up, and with the same help, mounted
two steps more. At this point her aunty’s stereotyped appeal, “Don’t
help her! let her alone, and let me see what she will do!” prevailed.
A candle was set on a higher step as a lure, and, sure enough, the
little thing, unaided, set her knee on the higher level, laid hold with
her hands, and drew herself up. It is significant that true climbing
movements should be so early and so easily caught at a single partial
lesson; and I shall have occasion to say more about it before the story
of the baby’s first year closes.

In the very last days of the tenth month came a wonderful spring
upward in the little one’s intelligence about her surroundings, and
in her power of communicating with us. It involved the real beginning
of spoken words--for the cat cry of the month before remained by
itself, leading to nothing more, and though it was the first sound that
expressed an idea, it was not from it, but from this later root, that
spoken language sprang and grew.

But the mental and language progress of these few days, just as
the baby came to ten months old, was the beginning of a stage of
development that belonged to the later months--a beginning too
important to be crowded in at the close of a chapter that is mainly
concerned with movement development. So I keep the account of it for
the story of the eleventh month.




XII

RUDIMENTS OF SPEECH; CLIMBING AND PROGRESS TOWARD WALKING


          Talk before you go,
  Your tongue will be your overthrow,

says the old saw. But perhaps our baby did not earn the ill omen,
it was such a faint foreshadowing of speech that she was guilty of.
Probably she would not have been detected in it at all, had not ten
months’ practice made us pretty good detectives. Indeed, but for
the notebook, by which I could compare from day to day the wavering
approach to some meaning in her use of this or that syllable, I should
not have dared to be sure there really was a meaning. It is in these
formless beginnings of a beginning that we get our best clues (as
in all evolutionary studies) to the real secrets of the origin of
language.

The little girl, as she came to ten months old, was a greater chatterer
than ever, pouring out strings of meaningless syllables in joy or
sorrow, with marvelous inflections and changes--such intelligent
remarks as “Nĕ-nĕ-oom-bo,” and “Ga-boo-ng,” and “A-did-did-doo,” and
certain favored syllables over and over, such as “Dă-dă-dă.”

In the last four days of the tenth month we began to suspect a faint
consistency in the use of several of the most common sounds. We began
to think that something like “Dă!” (varying loosely to “Gă!” or “Dng!”
or “Did-dă!” or “Doo-doo!” but always hovering round plain “Dă!”) was
suspiciously often ejaculated when the little one threw out her hand
in pointing, or exulted in getting to her feet; that “Nă-nă-nă!” was
separating itself out as a wail of unwillingness and protest, and
“Mă-mă-mă!” as a whimper of discontent, and loneliness, and desire of
attention; while--nearest of all to a true word--a favorite old murmur
of “M-gm” or “Ng-gng” recurred so often when something disappeared from
sight that we could not but wonder if we had not here an echo of our
frequent “All gone!”

All these sounds were used often enough at other times, and other
sounds were used in their special places; yet week by week the notebook
showed “Dă!” growing into the regular expression of discovering,
pointing out, admiring, exulting; “Nă-nă-nă!” into that of refusal and
protest; and “Mă-mă-mă,” which soon became “Mom-mom-mom,” into that
of a special sort of wanting, which slowly gathered itself about the
mother in particular. I do not think that these were echoes of our
words “There!” and “No!” and “Mamma;” it was only slowly, and after the
baby was a year old, that they came into unison with these words--and
in the case of “Mamma,” not without some teaching. It is more likely
that we have here a natural cry of pointing out, a natural negative, a
natural expression of baby need and dependence, which give us a hint of
the origin of our own words.

The fourth sound, however, which developed through many variations
(such as “M-gâ,” “Gâ,” or “Gng”) to a clear “Gông,” “A-gông,” and
even “Gone,” was plainly an echo. It was used as loosely as it was
pronounced: the baby murmured “Ng-gng!” pensively when some one left
the room; when she dropped something; when she looked for something she
could not find; when she had swallowed a mouthful of food; when she
heard a door close. She wounded her father’s feelings by commenting
“M-gâ!” as her little hands wandered about the unoccupied top of his
head. She remarked “Gông!” when she slipped back in trying to climb a
step; when she failed to loosen a cord she wished to play with; when
she saw a portière, such as she was used to hide behind; when she was
refused a bottle she had begged for. It meant disappearance, absence,
failure, denial, and any object associated with these.

In just this fashion, Preyer’s boy used his first word of human speech,
at about this age. “Atta!” the little fellow would murmur when some one
left the room, or when the light went out--using a favorite old babble
of his own, just as our baby did, to help him get hold of a grown-up
word, “Adieu” or “Ta-ta,” which carried the meaning he was after. The
idea of _disappearance_--of the thing now seen, now gone--seems to take
strong hold on babies very early; I have known several other cases.

In all this we seem to see quite clearly the first steps in language
making. The baby begins slowly to turn some of his commonest chattering
sounds to special uses--not to carry thought to other people, but as
mere exclamations to relieve his own mind. It was just twice within
her first year that our baby turned to me when some one left the room,
looked in my face, and said “Gông!” At all other times it was only
murmured to herself. And most of the exclamations express a mood rather
than a real idea; they are halfway between mere cries and words proper.
Even when there is plainly an idea, as in “All gone,” it is a big,
vague blur of an idea, slowly taking form in the little mind, as the
blurs of light and dark slowly outlined themselves into objects before
the little eyes months before.

At this point the modern baby catches the trick of helping himself to
our words ready made, and (though many glimpses of primitive speech
show through the whole process of learning to talk) he thus saves
himself in the main the long task of developing them, through which his
ancestors toiled.

In fact, the next word our baby took into use, a fortnight later, was
lifted bodily from our speech: a reproving “Kha!” by which we tried
to disgust her with the state of her fingers after they had been
plunged into apple sauce or like matters. She quite understood what it
referred to, though she did not share our objection to messy fingers,
and thereafter surveyed her own complacently in such plight, and
commented, “Kha!” And I may here run ahead so far as to say that this
was the full list of her spoken words within the first year, except
that in the next month she used an assenting “Ĕ!” which may have been
“Yes;” and in the last days of the year she began to exclaim first
“By!” then “My!” (corrupted from “By-by”) in saying farewell.

During this fortnight of swift language development the little one’s
progress in movements had been slight. But towards the middle of the
eleventh month she took a fresh start. One day she raised herself to
her feet without anything to hold to; stood on tiptoe to peer over the
seat of her high chair; forgot to hold to me, in her eagerness for a
fruit I was peeling, and stood alone for a minute and a half at least,
while I peeled it and fed it into her mouth; clambered into my lap
(as I sat beside her on the floor), setting one little foot up first,
laying hold of my shoulder, and tugging herself up with mighty efforts.

She chanced, too, on the art of shoving a chair before her for a step
or two; and the next day, in her eagerness to reach a glass of water
her father was bringing, she took one unconscious forward step, which
ended in prompt collapse on the lawn. But neither of these beginnings
was followed up by any real advance in learning to walk. During the
rest of the month she edged about more freely, and in the last week
pushed chairs before her a little again; and if we supported her and
urged her forward, she would walk clumsily, much as a puppy will if you
lead him by the fore paws; but she seemed to find the movement scarcely
more natural than the puppy does, and always wanted soon to drop down
to all-fours.

But climbing was a different matter. Here the baby seemed laid hold
of by strong desire and instinct. The day after she climbed into my
lap, she spent a long time zealously climbing up a doorstep and letting
herself down backward from it. The day after that, she tackled the
stairs and climbed two steps. Later in the day, I set her at the bottom
of the stairs and moved slowly up before her. The little thing followed
after (her mother’s arms close behind, of course; no one would be crazy
enough to start a baby upstairs without such precaution), tugging from
step to step, grunting with exertion now and then, and exclaiming with
satisfaction at each step conquered; slipping back once or twice, but
undiscouraged--fifteen steps to the landing, where she pulled to her
feet by the stair-post, hesitated, made a motion to creep down head
first, then crept, laughing, across the landing, and up five steps
more, and shouted with triumph to find herself on the upper floor. She
even looked with ambition at the garret stairs, and started towards
them; but an open door tempted her aside to explore a room, and she
forgot the stairs.

For the rest of the month the baby dropped to hands and knees and
scrabbled joyously for the stairs at every chance of open door; she
was not satisfied without going up several times daily; and having
people who believed in letting her do things, and insuring her safety
by vigilance while she did them, instead of by holding her back, she
soon became expert and secure in mounting. She made assaults, too, on
everything that towered up and looked in the least climbable--boxes,
chairs, and all sorts of things, quite beyond her present powers. She
seemed possessed by a sort of blind compulsion towards the upward
movement.

What are we to make of this strong climbing impulse, this untaught
skill in putting up the foot or knee and pulling the body up, while
walking is still unnatural? I sought out every record I could find, and
the indications are that our baby was not an exception; that as a rule
climbing does come before walking, if a baby is left free to develop
naturally. Of course in many cases walking is artificially hastened and
climbing prevented.

Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when
the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by
balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they
edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours
and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree
to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this:
the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse
to _pull up_, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which
standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up; the slow
and doubtful development of creeping, as if the ancestral creature had
been almost purely a tree-dweller, with no period of free running on
all-fours.

Tree-dwelling creatures, living on the dainties of the forest,
fruit and nuts and eggs and birds, are better nourished than the
ground-roaming tribes; but that is not half the story. The tree mothers
cannot tuck their babies away in a lair and leave them; the tree babies
cannot begin early to scramble about, like little cubs--their dwelling
is too unsafe. There is nothing for it but the mother’s arms; the
baby must be held, and carried, and protected longer than the earth
babies. That was the handicap of the tree life, our ancestors might
have thought--the helpless babies. But, as we have seen in an earlier
chapter, it was that long, helpless babyhood that gave the brain its
chance to grow and made us human.

At eleven months old our little girl could stand alone as long as she
cared to, though perhaps it was not till the next month that she felt
altogether secure on her feet. She could climb up and down stairs with
perfect ease. She could walk held by one hand, but she did not care
to, and creeping was still her main means of getting anywhere.

Her understanding of speech had grown wonderfully, and as she was
docile in obeying directions, I could always find out whether she knew
a thing by name by saying, “Point to the rose,” or “Bring the book to
aunty,” and thus found it possible to make out a trustworthy list of
the words she knew: fifty-one names of people and things; twenty-eight
action words, which she proved she understood by obeying (“give” and
“sit down,” and the like), and a few adverbial expressions, like
“where” and “all gone”--eighty-four words in all, securely associated
with ideas. She understood them in simple combinations, too, such as,
“Bring mamma Ruth’s shoes;” and often, where she did not know all the
words in a sentence, she could guess quite shrewdly from those she did,
interpreting our movements vigilantly.

For her own speech, the small set of spoken words she owned was of
little use; indeed, as I have said, these were only exclamations.
For talking to us she used a wonderfully vivid and delicate language
of grunts, and cries, and movements. She would point to her father’s
hat, and beg till it was given her; then creep to him and offer the
hat, looking up urgently into his face, or perhaps would get to her
feet at his side and try to put it on his head; when he put it on, up
would go her little arms with pleading cries till he took her, and
then she would point to the door and coax to be carried outdoors. She
would offer a handkerchief with asking sounds when she wished to play
peekaboo; or a whistle, to be blown; or a top, to be spun. When she was
carried about the garden or taken driving, or when she crept exploring
and investigating about the rooms, she would keep up a most dramatic
running comment of interest, joy, inquiry, amusement, desire; and it
was remarkable what shades of approval and disapproval, assent, denial,
and request she could make perfectly clear.




XIII

WALKING ALONE; DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE


And now our little girl was entered on the last month of the year--a
month of the most absorbing activity, yet perhaps rather in practicing
the powers she already had than in developing new ones. She added to
the list of words she understood till it was impossible to make record
of them all--new ones cropped up at every turn. She made the two small
additions to her spoken words that I have already mentioned. She
became perfectly secure in standing, and she was even more zealous to
climb than before, making nothing, in the latter part of the month, of
turning at the top of the stairs and sliding down, head first or feet
first, rarely needing for safety the vigilant arms that always hovered
ready to catch her.

For a time she made little advance towards walking, though she began
now to show some pleasure and pride in being led about by the hand.
But about the middle of the month the walking instinct seemed at
last to stir. The little one had often stepped from chair to chair,
keeping a hand on one till she had fairly hold of the other. If the
gap was an inch wider than she could cross thus, she dropped down and
crept. Now one day she looked at the tiny gap, let go her chair, stood
longingly, made a movement as if to take the single step, and dropped
ignominiously and crept; nor would she trust herself of her own accord
to movement on her feet (though once her mother did coax her a few
steps) for nearly a week. Then at last she ventured it.

I did not see the first exploit, but the next day I set her against the
wall and told her to walk, and she would step forward with much sense
of insecurity, tottering and taking tiny inches of steps, her legs
spreading more widely at each one, till I caught her in my arms. Once
I let her go as far as she could. She would not give up and sit down,
but went on as far as her legs would carry her, tremulous, pleased,
half afraid, half proud, and wholly conscious of doing something
remarkable; and when at the seventh step she subsided to the floor, she
was not in the least frightened, but got up readily and tottered on
another six steps.

The next day she had weakened, however, and for several days she would
not try again; and when she did try, she fell down after a single step.
She wanted to try again, and crept back to the wall, stood up, laughed,
waved her arms, made a false start, and could not quite find the
courage. In the four days that remained of her first year she sometimes
forgot herself and took a step or two; and she was perfectly able to
take half a dozen any time, strong and steady on her feet; but it was
not till shortly after the close of the year that she cast aside her
fears and suddenly was toddling everywhere.

It was about the middle of the twelfth month that the little one added
the useful sign of nodding to her means of communicating. She had been
taught to nod as a mere trick the month before, and took to it at once,
jerking her whole little body at every nod and priding herself mightily
on it. Perhaps because of this pride and pleasure, it became after a
time a sort of expression of approval: she greeted us with nodding
in sign of pleasure when we came in; she nodded like a mandarin when
she heard she was to go to ride. So now, when a pleasant suggestion
was made, “Would Ruth like a cracker?” “Does Ruth want to go see the
kitties?” her nod of approval soon passed into the meaning of assent;
indeed, it began now to be joined with the grunt of “Ĕ!” that I have
mentioned. She had a perfectly intelligible negative grunt, too, just
such as grumpy grown people use, out of the primitive stock of their
remotest ancestry, no doubt.

I was nearly taken in at one time by this cheerful nodding and “Ĕ!”
The little lady used them so intelligently when she was offered
something she wanted, and refused so consistently when offered what
she knew she did not want, that I began to set down any question as
understood if she said yes to it. But presently I had an inkling that
when she did not know whether she wanted it or not, she said yes, on
the chance--since most things prefaced by “Does Ruth want?” proved
pleasant. So I asked her alluringly, “Does Ruth want a course in higher
mathematics?”

The rosy baby looked at me gravely, waited with a considering air, as
she always did, taking it in, nodded gravely, and said decisively, “Ĕ!”

“Does Ruth want to go and be a missionary in Raratonga?”

“Ĕ!” with no less decision.

I saved her confidence in my good faith by substituting something
else as good, and more immediately practicable, for the mysterious
attractions I had offered, and used due caution thereafter in recording
her answers.

It was evident that in a primitive way the little one was comparing and
inferring not a little by this time. A week before, her grandmother
had told her which was O on a set of letter cards she played with, and
presently she showed Q with an inquiring cry: “What is this that looks
so much like O and yet is not O?” It may be added that she always knew
O afterwards, and picked up most of the other letters as easily--an
evidence of the unnecessarily hard work we make of learning the letters
by postponing them till the normal age of picking up the name of
anything and everything is past.

She was, of course, sometimes quaintly misled in an inference by lack
of knowledge. In the last week of the month I shut my eyes and asked
her, “Where are aunty’s eyes?” The baby tried in vain to find them
behind the lids, and then leaned over from my lap and looked carefully
for the lost eyes on the floor!

I hardly think that memory is much developed at this age; the
probability is that even the two year old remembers things only in
glimpses--one here and one there, but nothing continuous: this is one
of the great differences between his mind and ours. But our little
girl plainly remembered some things for days. In the second week of
the month her uncle showed her how he lifted the window sash, and four
days after, catching sight of the finger handle, she tugged at it with
impatient cries, trying to make the sash go up. A few days later,
having a flower in her hand when her feet were bare, she began, with a
sudden memory, to beg to have something done to her toes with it, and
it proved that two or three weeks before her mother had stuck a flower
between the fat toes.

All this month, even more than in the eleventh, she was incessantly
busy in exploring and learning. She opened boxes, took things out,
and put them back; worked with infinite diligence and seriousness at
such matters as getting a rubber ring off a notebook I had stretched it
round; investigated crannies, spaces under grates, doors ajar, with an
undying curiosity.

She began to imitate our actions more: she tried to comb her hair, to
put flowers into a vase, to mark on a paper with a pencil; she pulled
at her toes and muttered, as if she were saying the piggy rhyme.

She had a distinct idea as to what constituted herself, and when she
was asked, “Where is Ruth?” she did not indicate her whole body, but
always seized her head in her hands with certainty and decision.

She took delight in the new uses of mind and memory, no less than in
her bodily powers; she would recall the association of an object and
its name with joyous laughter, and her “Dă!” when she was asked to
point to something was a cry of pleasure.

She had not an atom of moral sense, nor the least capacity of
penitence or pity, but she was a friendly little thing, with no
worse tempers than a resentful whimpering when she was put into her
clothes--incumbrances that she much disliked. She was assiduous in
putting her crackers into her friends’ mouths, whether for fun or for
good-will; and it was not uncommon for her to throw herself, with
kisses and clinging arms, about our necks after we had given her
some specially valued pleasure, such as taking her outdoors. She was
learning to coax effectively with kisses, too, when she wished very
much to go.

And so the story of the swift, beautiful year is ended, and our wee,
soft, helpless baby had become this darling thing, beginning to
toddle, beginning to talk, full of a wide-awake baby intelligence, and
rejoicing in her mind and body; communicating with us in a vivid and
sufficient dialect, and overflowing with the sweet selfishness of baby
coaxings and baby gratitude. And at a year old, there is no shadow
on the charm from the perception that its end is near. By the second
birthday we say, “Ah, we shall be losing our baby soon!” But on the
first, we are eager, as the little one herself is, to push on to new
unfoldings; it is the high springtime of babyhood--perfect, satisfying,
beautiful.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.