Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/264

252 the forefinger if any one did so to her, used a brush after she had seen brushes and combs, used a spoon properly, and drank from a cup, and made a kind of cradling movement with her doll, singing, "Eia—eia" In the thirteenth month the child made the motion of sewing, of writing (moistening the point of the pencil in her mouth), and of folding the arms. In the fifteenth month she fed the doll as she was fed herself, imitated shaving, on her own chin, and reading aloud, moving her finger along the [lines and modulating her voice. In the eighteenth month she imitated singing, and made the motion of turning a crank like a hurdy-gurdy player when she heard music; in the nineteenth she went on hands and feet, crying "Au, au!" (ow, ow), in imitation of a dog; in the twentieth she imitated smoking, holding a cane firmly with her fingers exactly as is done in smoking a pipe. Her younger sister, in her fifteenth month, first imitated the movement of sewing and of writing; while the elder, in the nineteenth month, after repeated attempts at imitation, sewed together two pieces of cloth, without instruction, drawing the needle through correctly (Frau von Strümpell).

Toward the end of the first year of life the voluntary imitative movements, more numerous than before, are executed much more skillfully and more quickly. But when they require complex co-ordination they easily fail. When (at the beginning of the twelfth month) any one struck several times with a salt spoon on a tumbler so that it resounded, my child took the spoon, looked at it steadily, and then likewise tried to strike on the glass with it, but he could not make it ring. In such imitations, which are entirely new, and on that account make a deeper impression, as in the case of puffing (Pusten), it would happen that they were repeated by the child in his dreams, without interruption of his sleep (twelfth month), a proof that the experiences of the day, however unimportant they appear to the adult, have stamped themselves firmly upon the impressionable brain of the child. But it takes always some seconds before a new or partly new movement, however simple, is imitated, when it is made for the child to imitate—e. g., it was a habit of my child (in the fourteenth month) to move both arms symmetrically hither and thither, saying, "ay—ĕ, ay—ĕ (altogether differently, much more persistently and rapidly, than when beckoning). If some one made this very swinging of the arms for the child to observe, with the same sound, there was always an interval of several seconds before the child could execute the movement in like fashion. The simplest mental processes of all, therefore, need much more time than they do later. But imitations of this kind are almost always performed more quickly when they are not sought, when the child-brain is not obliged first to get its