250 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tenth day of life (in tlie batli, when a burning candle was held 

 before him at the distance of a metre) ; in the seventh week it 

 was decidedly marked at sight of a ncAV face quite near him ; in 

 the tenth week, at the bending and stretching of his legs in the 

 bath. It was as if the letter u were to be pronounced — and yet 

 the child was wholly unable to imitate this movement so easily 

 made by him (as late as the fourteenth week) when I made it 

 for him under the most favorable circumstances. At the end of 

 the fifteenth week appeared for the first time the beginnings of 

 an imitation, the infant making attempts to purse the lips when 

 I did it close in front of him. That this was a case of imitative 

 movement is shown by the imperfect character of it in compari- 

 son with the perfect pursing of the lips when he makes the move- 

 ment of his own accord in some other strain of the attention. 

 Strangely enough, the imitation was attempted on the one hun- 

 dred and fifth day, but not in the following days. 



Further attempts at imitation occurred so seldom and were 

 so imperfect, notwithstanding much pains on my part to induce 

 them, in the following weeks, that I was in doubt whether they 

 might not be the result of accidental coincidences. Not till the 

 seventh month were the attempts to imitate movements of the 

 head, and the pursing of the lij)s already spoken of, so striking 

 that I could no longer refer them to accidental coincidence. In 

 I)articular the child often laughed when one laughed to him (p. 

 145). The attention is now more and more plainly strained when 

 new movements are made for the infant to see — he follows these 

 with evident interest, but without coming to the point of an at- 

 tempt at imitation in a single instance. This indolence was the 

 more surj)rising, as even in the seventeenth week the protruding 

 of the tip of the tongue between the lips (customary with many 

 adults at their work) was perfectly imitated once, when done by 

 me before the child's face, and the child in fact smiled directly 

 at this strange movement Avliich seemed to please him. Imita- 

 tive movements thus appear in the fourth month, which in the 

 seventh, and even the ninth, do not succeed or are quite imper- 

 fectly achieved. Yet in the tenth month correct imitations of 

 all sorts of movements were frequent, and it is certain that these 

 were executed with distinct consciousness ; for, when he is imi- 

 tating movements of hand and arm frequently repeated before 

 him — e. g., beckoning [in the general sense of making a sign] 

 and saying — " Tatta " — the child looks fixedly at the person con- 

 cerned, and then often suddenly makes the movement quite cor- 

 rectly. 



Beckoning {Winken) is in general one of the moVements of 

 the infant acquired early by imitation. In my child it appeared 

 for the first time at the beginning of the tenth month. When 



