196 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts , and Letters . 
course, connective function is almost wholly lacking in the in¬ 
fant’s expression, since his mental content is not sufficiently 
differentiated to require connective terms; or at least he can get 
on very well without them. When a boy of seventeen months 
says “My—go—snow” (I want to go out into the snow) and a 
little later Avhen he comes in, exclaiming “My—come—snow” (I 
am coming in from the snow),—here the child is not in any ex¬ 
plicit sense aware of the difference between going to the snow 
and coming from it. In his own thought snow occupies the all 
important place. His attention is filled with his experience in 
the snow. In the first instance he longs to have these experiences 
repeated, and his sentence, “my—go—snow*,” will reveal his de¬ 
sires completely and definitely to his care-takers. In the second 
instance his “my—come—snow*” also meets the needs of definite 
expression; here his impulses concern the imparting of his ex¬ 
periences to his care-taker; and these experiences do not include 
to any appreciable extent the relation expressed by the preposi¬ 
tion in adult speech. The verbs—“go” and “come”—used in 
this special connection, include the idea of prepositional rela¬ 
tion, so to say,—a principle exhibited in all primitive language, 
according to Muller, Sayce, Powell, Romanes, and others. With 
the child’s relatively undifferentiated experience, and with his 
facility in gesture, as I have suggested, he may readily convey 
his notions without such relational terms, and this is why he 
never employs them at the outset of sentence making. As ex¬ 
periences multiply and become ever more complex, and there 
arises an urgent need to express precisely experiences remote in 
time and place, gesture is found sooner or later not to be definite 
enough, and then prepositions will begin to find their way into 
the child’s vocabulary. It may be added by way of qualification 
that the imitative tendencies of the child lead him often to 
adopt connective terms before he has real need for them, but it 
is probable that such terms are not imitated as readily as those 
expressive of concrete elements of experience. However, me¬ 
chanical imitation must be reckoned with, and if it were not for 
this the average child would, I think, leave relational terms 
locked up in the other parts of speech somewhat longer than he 
usually does. 
