Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/262

250 tenth day of life (in the bath, when a burning candle was held before him at the distance of a metre); in the seventh week it was decidedly marked at sight of a new face quite near him; in the tenth week, at the bending and stretching of his legs in the bath. It was as if the letter u were to be pronounced—and yet the child was wholly unable to imitate this movement so easily made by him (as late as the fourteenth week) when I made it for him under the most favorable circumstances. At the end of the fifteenth week appeared for the first time the beginnings of an imitation, the infant making attempts to purse the lips when I did it close in front of him. That this was a case of imitative movement is shown by the imperfect character of it in comparison with the perfect pursing of the lips when he makes the movement of his own accord in some other strain of the attention. Strangely enough, the imitation was attempted on the one hundred and fifth day, but not in the following days.

Further attempts at imitation occurred so seldom and were so imperfect, notwithstanding much pains on my part to induce them, in the following weeks, that I was in doubt whether they might not be the result of accidental coincidences. Not till the seventh month were the attempts to imitate movements of the head, and the pursing of the lips already spoken of, so striking that I could no longer refer them to accidental coincidence. In particular the child often laughed when one laughed to him (p. 145). The attention is now more and more plainly strained when new movements are made for the infant to see—he follows these with evident interest, but without coming to the point of an attempt at imitation in a single instance. This indolence was the more surprising, as even in the seventeenth week the protruding of the tip of the tongue between the lips (customary with many adults at their work) was perfectly imitated once, when done by me before the child's face, and the child in fact smiled directly at this strange movement which seemed to please him. Imitative movements thus appear in the fourth month, which in the seventh, and even the ninth, do not succeed or are quite imperfectly achieved. Yet in the tenth month correct imitations of all sorts of movements were frequent, and it is certain that these were executed with distinct consciousness; for, when he is imitating movements of hand and arm frequently repeated before him—e. g., beckoning [in the general sense of making a sign] and saying—"Tatta"—the child looks fixedly at the person concerned, and then often suddenly makes the movement quite correctly.

Beckoning (Winken) is in general one of the movements of the infant acquired early by imitation. In my child it appeared for the first time at the beginning of the tenth month. When