Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/265

Rh, but acts spontaneously. If I clear my throat, or cough purposely, without looking at the child, he often gives a little cough likewise in a comical manner. If I ask, "Did the child cough?" or if I ask him, "Can you cough?" he coughs, but generally copying less accurately (in the fourteenth and fifteenth months). The bow too tightly strained shoots beyond the mark.

Here, besides pure imitation, there is already understanding of the name of the imitated movement with the peculiar noise.

This important step in knowledge once taken, the movements imitated become more and more complicated, and are more and more connected with objects of daily experience. In the fifteenth month the child learns to blow out a candle. He puffs from six to ten times in vain, and grasps at the flame meantime, laughs when it is extinguished, and exerts himself, after it has been lighted, in blowing or breathing, with cheeks puffed out and lips protruded to an unnecessary degree, because he does not imitate accurately. For it can hardly be that a child that has never seen how a candle can be blown out would hit upon the notion of blowing it out. Understanding and experience are not yet sufficient to make this discovery.

I find, in general, that the movements made for imitation are the more easily imitated correctly the less complicated they are. When I opened and shut my hand alternately, merely for the purpose of amusing the child, he suddenly began to open and shut his right hand likewise in quite similar fashion. The resemblance of his movement to mine was extremely surprising in comparison with the awkward blowing out of the candle in the previous instance. It is occasioned by the greater simplicity. Yet, simple as the bending of the finger seems, it requires, nevertheless, so many harmonious impulses, nerve-excitements, and contractions of muscular fibers, that the imitation of simple movements even can hardly be understood without taking into account the element of heredity, since unusual movements, never performed, it may be, by ancestors—say, standing on the head—are never, under any circumstances, imitated correctly at the first attempt. The opening and shutting of the hand is just one of the movements by no means unusual, but often performed by ancestors. Still, it is to be noticed that at the beginning the imitation proceeded very slowly, although correctly. On the very next day it was much more rapid on the repetition of the attempt, and the child, surprised by the novelty of the experience, now observed attentively first my hand and then his own (fifteenth month).

Of the numerous more complicated movements of the succeeding period, the following, also, may be mentioned, in order to show the rapid progress in utilizing a new retinal image for