290 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 190 



truth knowingly to get out of scrapes, to shift the 

 blame on others, to arouse a laugh and thus 

 change the subject, and do it with great logical 

 acuteness. An emotional element often enters ; 

 fright makes them unable to clearly tell what has 

 happened; distrust of adults often acts in the same 

 way. One must gain the child's confidence to be 

 able to correct the fault. It is only under bad 

 treatment or hereditary taint that the habit be- 

 comes a serious moral fault : in its typical phase 

 it is simply a stage in the intellectual development 

 of the child. 



The dawn of self -consciousness is an interesting 

 stage in child-growth. This M. Perez very justly 

 divides into two parts : the first is the age at 

 which the child distinguishes its person as a thing 

 apart from other external things, and which M. 

 Perez puts at ten months, although Preyer's child, 

 more than one year old, caught hold of its arm 

 as an external object ; the second, the age at which 

 it recognizes itself as the centre of the emotions, 

 thoughts in which it lives. This is not clearly 

 done until the age of five or six : at about that 

 age the child has ample material for taking the 

 introspective attitude, and studying his own per- 

 sonality. Lotze, it may be noted, considered the 

 attention to one's self which a new dress causes, 

 as an important agent in the development of self- 

 consciousness. 



The logic used by children is an interesting 

 topic. The unconscious processes of thought 

 must be included under this term. When the 

 child says it avoids the fire because it burns, it 

 goes through an unconscious syllogistic process. 

 But, having little knowledge of general proposi- 

 tions, its deductive processes are very rudimen- 

 tary. The induction has the same faults as that of 

 hasty reasoners, — generalization on too slim a basis. 

 If the uniformity of nature is the guiding princi- 

 ple of induction, evidently one who has had little 

 experience of this uniformity will go astray in his 

 logic. Little Jack concludes that men do not go 

 to church because his father does not. 



The emotions of the first years are vivid, tran- 

 sient, and naive. The child's actions are largely 

 impulsive : it has no reasoned moral algebra. It 

 has a meagre conception of time : it lives in the 

 present, and future ills have little meaning. A 

 child usually overrates its own powers, is sanguine 

 and selfish. The higher sentiments, aesthetic and 

 moral, depend largely on education. 



The development of the will includes a motor, 

 an intellectual and an emotional element. With 

 the development of the muscular system, its 

 acts come to coincide more and more with its 

 intentions. The repressing of unnecessary, 

 partly reflex manifestations is one of the most 



serious tasks of childhood. It requires all the 

 skill of the parent and educator to make the child 

 a useful, mentally economical member of society, 

 without killing out that naivete and naturalness 

 of development so difficult to retain amid the arti- 

 ficiality of modem society. It is here that the 

 formation of habit as a saver of time and energy 

 becomes all-important. 



Perhaps this sampling sufficiently indicates the 

 contents of the work of M. Perez. It opens a rich 

 field. Those who come after will be glad to profit 

 by his experience. Joseph Jastrow. 



WORK OF THE MAINE AGRICULTURAL 

 EXPERIMENT-STA TION. 



TfflS modest report of eighty -seven pages covers 

 the work of the station from its foimdation, July 

 1, 1885, to June 30, 1886, and, though small, is a 

 model of what such reports should be. The first 

 portion is devoted to the fertilizer control work, 

 and contains analyses of seventy-five samples of 

 fertilizers and fertilizing materials, together with 

 explanations of the principles on which the 

 ' valuation ' of fertilizers is based. 



The second portion of the report is of more 

 general interest, and contains the results of sev- 

 eral feeding experiments. Determinations of the 

 digestibility of indian-corn, corn-meal, and corn 

 ground with the cob, when fed to a pig, showed 

 that the meal was much more completely digested 

 than the whole corn, while the percentage diges- 

 tibility of the corn-and-cob meal was below that 

 of the whole corn. A computation based on the 

 proportion of corn to cob in the corn used showed , 

 that, if we assume the corn of the corn-and-cob 

 meal to have had the same digestibility as the whole 

 corn, about one-ninth of the cob was digested. 



Some experiments on milk-production showed 

 a decided gain to result from substituting cotton- 

 seed-meal for a portion of the corn-meal of a 

 ration consisting of hay and corn-meal. Similar 

 experiments by Armsby at the Wisconsin experi- 

 ment-station have given the opposite result ; but 

 in discussing these, the director. Prof. W. H. 

 Jordan, shows that the apparent conflict is due to 

 differences in the conditions of the experiments 

 in the two cases. A similar advantage was found 

 to result from the use of cottonseed-meal in fat- 

 tening steers. 



Professor. Jordan's report is noteworthy for its 

 clearness of statement and its scientific spirit. 

 The experiments are planned with a definite pur- 

 pose, and the results are discussed in a way to 

 render them intelligible to any thinking farmer. 



Annual report of the Maine fertilizer control and agri- 

 cultural experiment- station, 1885-86. Augusta, State, 1886. 



