198 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters . 
down and reflected upon getting up stairs. The child’s con¬ 
sciousness might be said to be motor rather than ideal when he 
is expressing himself in this w r ay. The word is just one phase 
of a general motor excitement, and it is impossible that it should 
be used with precise prepositional value. Before this word can 
be employed as a preposition merely, a number of other words 
will need to be used with it in the sentence, each to carry phases 
of the meaning which it now carries alone. 
In her twelfth month, K. w'ould throw objects from her high- 
chair to the floor, and would exclaim “down!” To my mind, 
this term denoted mainly the racket made by the objects when 
they struck the floor. Prepositional relation was surely not a 
prominent element in the child’s consciousness on such occa¬ 
sions. A little later she would take an object in her hand, and 
at the moment of releasing it she would exclaim “down!” and 
blink, evidently anticipating the noise to follow, wdiich was the 
thing prominent in consciousness. Later on she would use the 
term when she wished to get out of her high-chair, but here, 
also, it had much more than prepositional meaning. Her con¬ 
sciousness could be expressed in adult language by the following, 
perhaps: “Unfasten me so I can get onto the floor and play.” 
It is improbable that the child uses such words as “up” or 
‘ ‘ down ’ ’ with strict prepositional meaning, or adverbial meaning 
either, before his third year at the earliest, and I should prefer 
to make it a year later. In the fourth year one may hear ex¬ 
pressions like the following: “I am going down the street;” 
“I climbed up the stairs,” etc., in which we doubtless have ex¬ 
amples of genuine prepositional function. The original terms 
“up” and “down” have persisted, but much of their early 
meaning has been drawn off from them, and loaded on to other 
terms in the sentence; and such is the history of other preposi¬ 
tions, as on, in, etc. 
It should be pointed out that there are prepositions which are 
never used except with prepositional meaning pure and simple. 
They describe relations which the child does not apprehend until 
he has made good headway in differentiating the parts of speech, 
and constructing the sentence. Before such terms as toward, 
among, against, notwithstanding, and the like are employed he 
