252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the forefinger if any one did so to her, used a brush after she 

 had seen brushes and combs, used a spoon properly, and drank 

 from a cup, and made a kind of cradling movement with her 

 doll, singing, "Eia — eia/' In the thirteenth month the child 

 made the motion of sewing, of writing (moistening the point of 

 the pencil in her mouth), and of folding the arms. In the fif- 

 teenth month she fed the doll as she was fed herself, imitated 

 shaving, on her own chin, and reading aloud, moving her finger 

 along the [lines and modulating her voice. In the eighteenth 

 month she imitated singing, and made the motion of turning a 

 crank like a hurdy-gurdy player when she heard music ; in the 

 nineteenth she went on hands and feet, crying " Au, au ! " (ow, 

 ow), in imitation of a dog ; in the twentieth she imitated smok- 

 ing, holding a cane firmly with her fingers exactly as is done in 

 smoking a pipe. Her younger sister, in her fifteenth month, 

 first imitated the movement of sewing and of writing ; while the 

 elder, in the nineteenth month, after repeated attempts at imita- 

 tion, sewed together two pieces of cloth, without instruction, 

 drawing the needle through correctly (Frau von Striimpell). 



Toward the end of the first year of life the voluntary imita- 

 tive movements, more numerous than before, are executed much 

 more skillfully and more quickly. But when they require com- 

 plex co-ordination they easily fail. When (at the beginning of 

 the twelfth month) any one struck several times with a salt- 

 spoon on a tumbler so that it resounded, my child took the spoon, 

 looked at it steadily, and then likewise tried to strike on the 

 glass with it, but he could not make it ring. In such imitations, 

 which are entirely new, and on that account make a deeper im- 

 pression, as in the case of puffing {Pusten), it would happen that 

 they were repeated by the child in his dreams, without interrup- 

 tion of his sleep (twelfth month), a proof that the experiences of 

 the day, however unimportant they appear to the adult, have 

 stamped themselves firmly upon the impressionable brain of the 

 child. But it takes always some seconds before a new or partly 

 new movement, however simple, is imitated, when it is made for 

 the child to imitate — e. g., it was a habit of my child (in the 

 fourteenth month) to move both arms symmetrically hither and 

 thither, saying, "ay — e, ay — 6" (altogether differently, much 

 more persistently and rapidly, than when beckoning). If some 

 one made this very swinging of the arms for the child to observe, 

 with the same sound, there was always an interval of several 

 seconds before the child could execute the movement in like 

 fashion. The simplest mental processes of all, therefore, need 

 much more time than they do later. But imitations of this kind 

 are almost always performed more quickly when they are not 

 sought, when the child-brain is not obliged first to get its bear- 



