130 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ent cries and exclamations, consisting exclusively of vowel-sounds ; 

 this continued several months. 



By degrees consonants were added to the vowels, and the excla- 

 mations became more and more articulate. This process resulted in a 

 sort of prattle of great diversity and completeness, which would be 

 kept up for a quarter of an hour at a time, and repeated ten times a 

 day. The sounds (vowel and consonant), which at first were vague 

 and very hard to discriminate, became more and more like those ut- 

 tered by adults, and the series of simple cries came to be, in some 

 measure, like a foreign language which we do not understand. The 

 infant is pleased with its prattle, like a bird ; one can see that she is 

 happy that she smiles with pleasure yet it is nothing better than 

 the chirruping of a bird as yet, for the child does not attach any 

 meaning to the sounds she utters. (Age, twelve months). 



She has acquired thus much, in great measure, by her own endeav- 

 ors and unassisted, but she has gained a little by the aid of others and 

 by imitation. First, of her own accord she produced the sound mm 

 this amused her it was for her a discovery. So, too, she of herself 

 produced another sound, kraaau, emitted from the windpipe in deep 

 gutturals. These two sounds were repeated several times in succes- 

 sion in the hearing of the child ; she would listen attentively, and 

 now she repeats them at once on hearing them. The same is to be 

 said of the sound papapapa, which she at first uttered several times 

 at random and by herself, and which was then repeated to her a num- 

 ber of times, in order to fix it in her memory. She soon uttered 

 this sound at will, with easy, unerring execution (though without un- 

 derstanding what it meant), as simple prattle. In short, example and 

 education have served only to call the child's attention to sounds 

 which she herself was already attempting to make ; to direct her pref- 

 erence to these, to make them uppermost among the host of similar 

 sounds. But the initiative all came from herself; and the same is to 

 be said with respect to gesture. For months she of her own accord 

 attempted all the movements of the arms, flexion of the hand at the 

 wrist, bringing the hands together, etc. Then, after instruction and 

 repeated effort, she learned to clap hands, to hold up the two hands, 

 as in the gesture of astonishment, etc. Example, instruction, and 

 education, are only channels in the bed of which the stream flows ; 

 its source lies higher. 



To see that this is the case, one has only to listen to her prattle for 

 an hour : it is wonderfully flexible. I am satisfied that here every shade 

 of emotion surprise, joy, vexation, sadness finds expression in va- 

 rieties of tone ; herein she equals or even surpasses the adult. On 

 comparing her with animals, even those best endowed in this way 

 such as the dog, parrot, singing-birds I find that, with a less-extended 

 gamut of sounds, she far surpasses them in the fineness and the abun- 

 dance of her expressive intonations. Delicacy of impressions and deli- 



