THE STUDY OF CHILD-NATURE. 791 
as a schoolboy, I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especi- 
ally in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly 
pictures gave me considerable and music very great delight ; 
but now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of 
poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found 
it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also 
almost lost my taste for pictures or music. I retain some 
taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite 
delight it formerly did.” To those whose emotional side 
has been uncultivated, we might repeat the saying of Talley- 
rand to a man who refused to learn whist ‘“‘ What an un- 
happy old age you are laying up for yourself!’ 
By means of a proper training of the emotions, we can 
stimulate and excite interest, so powerful a factor in the 
acquirement of knowledge. 
The belief was at one time widely accepted that the mind 
of the child is at first a tabula rasa, or blank wax tablet, 
upon which, by means of the senses, the outside world pro 
duced certain impressions, which constituted the sum total 
of a child’s knowledge. But a closer and more scientific 
investigation shows that the mind is by no means a tabula 
rasa, but, from the very first, has in itself inherited impres- 
sions derived from a long line of ancestry, and that when 
the more recent and individual impressions are formed, the 
brain is, as it were, a palimpsest on which, under the more 
obvious impressions of the present, can be traced those in- 
stinctive impressions which the child has inherited along 
with other subconscious peculiarities of the human species. 
We have already spoken of the earliest impressions on the 
child’s mind through the senses, and the outward expression 
by means of the emotions, by which we judge of those im- 
pressions, and we now pass to the next stage of mental 
growth, viz., the recognition and classification of sense per- 
ceptions, which constitute the first efforts of awakening in- 
telligence. “The first act of the human intellect,” says 
Preyer, “consists in the ordering of the impressions made 
upon the organs of sense.’ When a child recognises his 
mother’s face, or any other familiar object. he has already 
unconsciously begun to classify his impressions, and to select 
those which are familiar to him. The growth of this power 
is very gradual, and begins long before the child is capable 
of expressing his feelings in word-language. This may be 
seen from the fact that the early mental development in the 
case of deaf-mutes is hardly to be distinguished from that of 
normal children. The most important factor in the early 
growth of the child’s mind is curiosity—‘that chronic 
