November 17, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



667 



enee in America, and its application to the 

 problems of human life, have caused people 

 to regard the child as different in most re- 

 spects from the adult. And in his train- 

 ing he must receive what is adapted to his 

 needs at different points in his evolution; 

 which must be determined by observing 

 him, rather than by giving him what may 

 be suited for adults, only less of it, 

 since he is not so large or strong. Dur- 

 ing the past few decades we have been 

 hearing constantly that if the modes of 

 thinking and the activities proper to an 

 immature individual be suppressed in the 

 child in order to rush him through the 

 period of childhood, then the modes of 

 thinking and the activities normal to adult 

 life will be abortive or disordered, or they 

 may not appear at all. 



But within the last two or three years, 

 teachers and parents have been thrown 

 into a state of doubt and wonder on ac- 

 count of the reports which have been put 

 in circulation to the effect that normal 

 children two years of age or less have 

 been taught to read readily, not only in the 

 mother tongue, but in foreign languages; 

 and at this tender age they have shown 

 great facility in spelling, in numbers, and 

 in all branches of elementary education. 

 Eecently an educational magazine pub- 

 lished the following account of the abilities 

 of Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr., of Palo 

 Alto, Cal., who was eight years of age at 

 the time the report was made. The ac- 

 count says: 



She can carry on a conversation in English, 

 French, Spanish, Latin, Esperanto, Japanese, Eus- 

 sian, German, Polish and Italian, whUe in the first 

 five she can think as well as talk. Miss Stoner is 

 a healthy, normal child, as fond of dolls and play 

 as any other little girl who knows only one lan- 

 guage. Miss Stoner is also precocious as a writer 

 of verse, and a volume of her compositions has 



been published. This young lady shows not only 

 remarkably good sense of meter and rhyme, but a 

 keen sense of humor not often allied with pre- 

 cocity. This brilliant young woman of eight years 

 walked when she was six months old, talked when 

 eight months old, and scanned Virgil at one year 

 of age. She can take a sheet of music for the first 

 time, and, after looking it through once, can tell 

 every note that was on it and its place on the staff. 

 These are only a few of the wonderful things that 

 Winifred Sackville Stoner can do off-hand. The 

 interesting part of it all is that she has no one 

 unusual natural ability, but all this, from walking 

 at six months, talking at eight months and scan- 

 ning Virgil at twelve months, is acquired skill or 

 art, as you please, the result of the prodigious 

 activity of her teacher, Mrs. Stoner. 



During the past three years accounts of 

 extraordinary precocity, similar to that of 

 Winifred Stoner, have been published re- 

 garding William James Sidis, of Brook- 

 line, and other children of various ages, 

 but all under twelve. The news has been 

 spread abroad very generally that these 

 children mastered the mother tongue in its 

 oral and written forms at two or three 

 years of age ; that in a single year, at five 

 or six, they completed the eighn grades of 

 the elementary school, and that they 

 pushed through the high school in a year 

 or two. While they have been accomplish- 

 ing these feats, they have had leisure to go 

 far beyond the work of either the elemen- 

 tary or the high school in special sub.jects, 

 as in mathematics in the case of Master W. 

 J. Sidis, for instance. The accounts of the 

 achievements of these children have all 

 laid emphasis on the mastery, in infancy, 

 of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, 

 grammar and a little later of geometry, as- 

 tronomy and the principles of physics, 

 chemistry, mechanics, and even history, 

 political economy and kindred branches. 

 These reports have all emphasized the 

 statement that the precocious children had 

 not been robbed of their childhood, but 

 that they spoke and conducted themselves 



