606 SPEAKING, READING, WRITING : AS MENTAL 



** At first the child's articulatory capacity is confined 

 to mimicking — that is to say, it repeats such words only 

 as have just been spoken to it ; hut after a time, when 

 the act of emitting this sound has become perfectly easy 

 by constant repetition, the child gives utterance to it of 

 its own accord, on the mere sight of the object with 

 which the sound was originally associated in its mind. 

 This then is the second stage in the acquirement of lan- 

 guage ; and the child only slowly attains to a more perfect 

 performance of the mental and motor processes involved.'* 

 After a time, however. Thought and Language become in- 

 separably associated, so that words are voluntarily recalled 

 by the renewal of previous nerve actions in the Auditory 

 Perceptive Centres, and such nerve processes are followed 

 by the complex combination of muscular actions concerned 

 in the articulation of the several words as they arise in 

 Thought. 



Since the foregoing views were expressed and pub- 

 lished, the writer has met with an altogether unexpected 

 confirmation of their truth. In the year 1877 he was 

 consulted concerning the health of a boy, the son of a 

 leading barrister, who was then twelve years old, and 

 had been subject to * fits ' at intervals. The first fits 

 occurred in infancy, when the patient was about nine 

 months old. Towards the end of the second year these 

 fits seemed to have ceased, and the child appeared suffi- 

 ciently intelligent — to be well, in fact, in all respects except 

 that he did not talk. When nearly five years old the little 

 fellow still had not spoken a single word, and about this 

 time two eminent physicians were consulted in regard to 

 his ' dumbness.' But before the expiration of another 

 twelve months, as his mother reports, on the occasion of 

 an accident happening to one of his favourite toys, he sud- 

 denly exclaimed, " What a pity ! " though he had never 



