Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/614

596 Seeing lines of dots on a printed page, thus. . . (in a table of contents), she said, "Oh! pins," and made repeated attempts to pick them out. This would seem to have some bearing, however slight, on the gradual character of the process by which our vision of solid objects and perceptions of things as in three dimensions is acquired.

She now has a settled formula to ask for things she wants, and also to express acquiescence when told she is not to have them, e. g., "baby have pápá (pepper)," "baby have pápá no." The "no" is not given as it would be by an adult, as a distinct exclamation following a pause. There is no stop and no raising of the voice. When she is impatient, "baby have, baby have, baby have," is rapidly repeated. She is very persistent in trying to get a desired object, and if she cannot have it at once does not give it up, but proceeds to make the best terms she can; e. g., she asks for bacon, and is told it is not for her, but her parents must have it first. She answers, "then baby have bacon." Here is an elementary notion of bargain and compromise. The child is already πολιτικòν ζώον.

Bacon has lost its former generality, meats which appear at breakfast being now divided into egg, bacon, sis (fish), and beef. Once, after calling a new dish "bacon," and being corrected, she said "bacon no"—recognizing, one may say, the logical division into bacon and not-bacon. The child is now able, however, to take up new words very quickly. She has reached, so far as concerns the names of things, the advanced stage of knowledge in which the provisional character of generalizations is recognized.

At about twenty-three months ten days she cried violently on finding that her doll's head was coming off, and was pacified only when it was put out of sight with a promise that it should be mended. Her own report of the cause of her grief was "Bessie's head poor." The dramatic personification of the doll may probably count for something in this. But one is not strictly entitled to assume that she would cry less for damage to any other toy.

There are increasing signs of a desire to find explanations. Seeing in an illustrated advertisement a device of a griffin rampant supporting a kind of banner, the child invented a meaning of her own for it: "pussy ling (ring) bell." The figure of a man making pottery, which was part of the same advertisement, became "man open door," so as to form a single composition with the griffin. On hearing sounds in the street, knocks at the door, etc., the child readily (and, as a rule, spontaneously) assigns causes for them, saying "band," "organ," "man," "post," etc., as the case may be. Strange sounds, and at times sounds of a known class coming from an unfamiliar direction, appear to frighten her.

I should add that the greater part of these notes was already written before I saw M. Bernard Perez's very interesting book, "Les trois premières Années de l'Enfant" (Paris, 1878). I have retouched