59 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Seeing lines of dots on a printed page, thus ... (in a table of con- 

 tents), she said, " Oh ! pins," and made repeated attempts to pick them 

 out. This would seem to have some bearing, however slight, on the 

 gradual character of the process by which our vision of solid objects 

 and perceptions of things as in three dimensions is acquired. 



She now has a settled formula to ask for things she wants, and also 

 to express acquiescence when told she is not to have them, e. g., " baby 

 have pdpd (pepper)," " baby have pdpd no." The " no " is not given as 

 it would be by an adult, as a distinct exclamation following a pause. 

 There is no stop and no raising of the voice. When she is impatient, 

 " baby have, baby have, baby have," is rapidly repeated. She is very 

 persistent in trying to get a desired object, and if she cannot have it 

 at once does not give it up, but proceeds to make the best terms she 

 can ; e. g., she asks for bacon, and is told it is not for her, but her 

 parents must have it first. She answers, " then baby have bacon." 

 Here is an elementary notion of bargain and compromise. The child 

 is already twXitikov woi>. 



Bacon has lost its former generality, meats which appear at break- 

 fast being now divided into egg, bacon, sis (fish), and beef. Once, 

 after calling a new dish " bacon," and being corrected, she said " bacon 

 no " recognizing, one may say, the logical division into bacon and 

 not-bacon. The child is now able, however, to take up new words very 

 quickly. She has reached, so far as concerns the names of things, the 

 advanced stage of knowledge in which the provisional character of gen- 

 eralizations is recognized. 



At about twenty-three months ten days she cried violently on find- 

 ing that her doll's head was coming off, and was pacified only when it 

 was put out of sight with a promise that it should be mended. Her 

 own report of the cause of her grief was " Bessie's head poor." The 

 dramatic personification of the doll may probably count for something 

 in this. But one is not strictly entitled to assume that she would cry 

 less for damage to any other toy. 



There are increasing signs of a desire to find explanations. Seeing 

 in an illustrated advertisement a device of a griffin rampant supporting 

 a kind of banner, the child invented a meaning of her own for it : 

 " pussy ling (ring) bell." The figure of a man making pottery, which 

 was part of the same advertisement, became " man open door," so as 

 to form a single composition with the griffin. On hearing sounds in 

 the street, knocks at the door, etc., the child readily (and, as a rule, 

 spontaneously) assigns causes for them, saying " band," " organ," 

 "man," "post," etc., as the case may be. Strange sounds, and at 

 times sounds of a known class coming from an unfamiliar direction, 

 appear to frighten her. 



I should add that the greater part of these notes was already 

 written before I saw M. Bernard Perez's very interesting book, " Les 

 trois premieres Annees de l'Enfant" (Paris, 1878). I have retouched 



