Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/424

 408 CRITICAL NOTICES The Mental Development of a Child. By KATHLEEN CARTER MOORE. Monograph Supplement to the Psychological Review, October, 1896. Macmillan & Co. Pp. 150. THIS brochure comes opportunely in more ways than one. To begin with, it is a vigorous piece of individual observation, which is precisely what is wanted to correct the common impression that the conclusions reached by a single observer for example, Preyer hold good of all infants. Binet, Baldwin and others have shown that this is not so : Mrs. Moore's monograph illustrates the diversity among infants still more fully. Some of her observa- tions, indeed, deviate in a startling measure from those of her predecessors and call loudly for further " controlling " observations. In the second place, this new record of infantile development illustrates, if I am not greatly mistaken, the dangers besetting the new path of child-observation. Women and particularly mothers are, as I have elsewhere urged, exceptionally well situ- ated for carrying out a careful and continuous record of an infant's mental progress. On the other hand, the observation of the mental manifestations of an infant is especially difficult and is hardly possible save to one who has both undergone some me- thodical training in simpler kinds of observation and served a further term of apprenticeship as a student of psychology. How widely the untrained mother, knowing nothing of scientific re- sponsibility, can go astray in this alluring region, has recently been illustrated in English literature. Mrs. Moore is by no means a mere dallier with infantile ways ; she has a very real scientific interest in them. Her observations are often close and valuable : the aid which, as she tells us, she has received from her husband, a medical man, may have helped her here. But there is throughout a lamentable exhibition of insufficiency of psychological training. What is one to think of an observer who after telling us that she has drawn her greatest inspiration from the works of Professors Preyer and Wundt adds in a footnote that she has read " Die Seele des Kindes, translated and condensed by Miss Emma Marwedel and appended to her book Conscious MotherJwod " ? Why, one asks, did she not at least prepare herself by reading the very good translation of Preyer's work published by Messrs. Appleton ? One would conjecture, from internal evidence, that Mrs. Moore has read hardly anything in child-psychology, save perhaps Dr. Tracy's bare epitome of its principal results, which is of course perfectly useless for learning the methods of the science. And so it results that, notwithstanding excellent opportunities, and one would say a good deal of natural shrewdness and even something of subtlety of insight, Mrs. Moore has produced a work which cannot com- pare in scientific value with the more modest, restricted but thoroughly informed and accurate study of Miss Shinn of the University of California.