330 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ogy between scarlet and the note of a trumpet may easily be due, 

 in part at least, to association of tins tone with the scarlet uniform. 



I may add that I once happened to overhear a little girl of six 

 talking to herself about numbers in thiswise: "Two is a dark 

 number, forty is a white number." I questioned her, and found 

 that the digits had each its distinctive color, thus : " one," white ; 

 " two," dark ; " three," white ; " four," dark ; " five," pink, and so 

 on. " Nine " was pointed and dark, " eleven " dark green, showing 

 that some of the digits were much more distinctly visualized than 

 others. Just three years later I tested her again and found she 

 still visualized the digits, but not quite in the same way. Thus, 

 although " one " and " two " were white and black as before, 

 " three " was now gray, " four " red, " five " pink, " nine " had lost 

 its color, and " eleven," oddly enough, had turned from dark green 

 to bright yellow. 



This case suggests that in early life new experiences and asso- 

 ciations may modify the tint and the shade of sounds. However 

 this be, children's colored hearing is worth noting as the most 

 striking example of the general tendency to supplement and to 

 overlay sense-impressions with vivid images. It seems reasonable 

 to suppose that colored hearing and other allied phenomena, as 

 the picturing of numbers, days of the week, etc., in a certain 

 scheme or diagrammatic arrangement, when they show them- 

 selves after childhood, are to be viewed as survivals of early fan- 

 ciful brain work. This fact, taken along with the known vivid- 

 ness of the images in colored hearing, which in certain cases 

 approximate to sense-perception, seems to me to confirm the view 

 here put forth, that children's imagination may alter the world of 

 sense in ways which it is hard for our older and stiff-jointed minds 

 to follow. 



I have confined myself here to what I have called the play of 

 imagination, the magic transmuting of things through the sheer 

 liveliness and wanton activity of a child's fancy. How strong, 

 how vivid, how dominating such imaginative transformation 

 may become will of course be seen in cases where violent feeling, 

 and especially fear, gives preternatural intensity to the realizing 

 power of imagination. But this effect of emotion is too large a 

 subject to deal with here. 



This playful transformation of the actual surroundings is, of 

 course, restrained in serious moments and in intercourse with 

 older and graver folk. There is, however, a region of child life 

 where it knows no check ; where the impulse to deck out the 

 shabby reality with what is bright and gay has it all its own way. 

 This region is Play. In another article, with the permission of 

 the editor, I hope to take up the subject of children's play, con- 

 sidered as an expression of their imaginative activity. 



