Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/59

 help or direction. The request to put the top on was repeated a number of times and was carried out promptly; also the request to take it off. He had learned, at some time or other, the meaning of the words "turn the other way." That is, he understood, as he did not at the earlier dates, the direction to reverse the motion of his fingers. When or how he learned the meaning of "turn the other way," I do not know.

Learning to put on his own shoes.—For the mastery of this important, practical accomplishment, R. required much practice extending over a period of fifteen months, beginning with the fourteenth. In the last named month, if the child chanced to come across one of his shoes as he moved about the room, or if a shoe was tossed to him he pressed it against his foot showing that he remembered, in a general way, the customary place of the shoe. Perhaps one is not warranted in saying that, in these early efforts, the child was trying to put the shoe on; it was rather an imitative movement suggested by the idea of shoe-on-the-foot, or by the memory of seeing other persons put on his shoes. As has been indicated already, the child made the first successful effort to get his shoes on in the twenty-ninth month; that is, he could pull the shoe on, sometimes quickly, sometimes only after a great deal of pulling and tugging, depending upon the looseness of the lacing and the position of the shoe with reference to the foot. After the child had learned to pull