LINGUAL DEVELOPMENT IN BABYHOOD. 133 



lence human, naniety, the power of noting analogies. This is the 

 fountain-head of general ideas and of language. We point out to 

 her on the walls of a room the figures of birds painted red and blue, 

 a couple of inches in length, saying once only, " Look at the kokos." 

 She was at once conscious of the resemblance, and for half a day she 

 took the liveliest pleasure in being carried up and down along the 

 walls of the room, enthusiastically crying out, at the sight of each 

 bird, kokof No dog, no parrot would ever act thus, and, in my opin- 

 ion, we have in this fact the essence of language. Other analogies 

 she perceives with equal readiness. The first dog she ever saw was a 

 little black one belonging to the house, who barks frequently ; from 

 him she framed the word oua-oua. Very soon, with but slight as- 

 sistance from those around her, she applied this word to dogs of all 

 sizes and of every breed that she saw in the street ; later she applied 

 it to porcelain figures of dogs a still more noteworthy fact. Nay, 

 on seeing, day before yesterday, a month-old kid, she called it oua- 

 oua, thus naming it after the dog, which is the nearest form, rather 

 than after the horse, which is too big, or the cat, which has a different 

 gait. 1 Herein we perceive a trait characteristic of man : two very 

 dissimilar successive perceptions leave a common residue, a distinct 

 impression, solicitation, impulsion, which results in the invention or 

 adoption of some mode of expression, either by gesture, cry, articula- 

 tion, or name. 



I come now to the word tern, one of the most noteworthy and one 

 of the first pronounced by her. All the other words are probably 

 attributives, to use the language of Max Mtlller, 2 and a person has no 

 difficulty in discovering their meaning ; this is probably a demon- 

 strative, and, as we had no term with which to translate it, we took 

 several weeks to discover its meaning. 



At first, and for more than two weeks, the child pronounced* this 

 word tern as she did the word papa, without giving to it any precise 

 meaning; she thus practised dental articulation followed by a labial, 

 and the thing afforded her some amusement. By degrees the word 

 became associated in her mind with a definite intention, and at pres- 

 ent it means for her give, take, see, look. She pronounces it very per- 

 fectly, several times in succession, and with earnestness, her aim be- 

 ing now to get some new object which she sees, again to have some 

 one take her up, or to attract attention to herself. All these meanings 

 are comprised in the word tern. It may be that it is a form of the 

 word tiens, which had often been addressed to her in a somewhat 

 similar sense. But I am rather inclined to suppose that this word was 

 coined by herself to express her principal desires, viz., to be taken in 



1 When the Romans first saw the elephant they called it the Lucanian ox. Thus, too, 

 savage tribes that had never before seen a horse gave that animal the title of big hog. 

 (See Miiller's " Lectures on Darwin's Philosophy of Language.") 



2 Lectures on the " Science of Language," sixth edition, vol. i., p. 309. 



