EXTENT OF EAKLY MENTAL GROWTH. 293 



Btancea of which it has had experience. It has noted peculi- 

 arities among many animals and plants, and the distinctions, 

 traits, and habits of persons. 



Besides this, it has learned to associate names with its 

 ideas ; it has acquired a language. The number of words it 

 uses to express things and actions, and qualities, degrees, and 

 relations, among these things and actions, shows the extent to 

 which its discriminations have been carried. Groups of ideas 

 are integrated into trains of thought, and words into corre- 

 sponding trains of sentences to communicate them. Nor is 

 this all. There is still another order of acquisitions in which 

 the child has made remarkable proficiency. The infant is 

 endowed with a spontaneous activity : it moves, struggles, 

 and throws about its limbs as soon as it is born. But its 

 actions are at first aimless and confused. As it knows nothing, 

 of course, it can do nothing ; but, with the growth of dis- 

 tinct ideas and feelings, there is also a growth of special move- 

 ments in connection with them. It has to find out by innu- 

 merable trials how to creep, to walk, to hold things, and to 

 feed itself. To see an object and to be able to seize it, or to 

 go and get it, result from an adjustment of visual impres- 

 sions with muscular movements, which it has taken thousands 

 of experiments to bring under control. The vocal apparatus 

 has been brought under such marvellous command that hun- 

 dreds of different words are uttered, each requiring a differ- 

 ent combination of movements of the chest, larynx, tongue, 

 and lips. Numerous aptitudes and dexterities are achieved, 

 and, when, stimulated by curiosity, it examines its toy and 

 breaks it open to find " what makes it go," it has entered upon 

 a career of active experiment, as truly as the man of science in 

 his laboratory. 



rv. NATURE'S EDUCATIONAL METHOD. 

 Such is Nature's method of education, and such its earliest 

 results. Human beings are born into a world of stubborn 

 realities; of laws that are fraught with life and death in 

 their inflexible course. What the new-born creature shall be 

 taught is too important to be left to any contingency, and so 



