Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/145

Rh and silent world into which language could but sparsely enter, gave equally convincing proof of how busy their brains were with much the same kind of thoughts and purposes and interests as make up the mental lives of their more fortunate playmates. Naturally their doings were decidedly hampered, and their thinkings decidedly limited by the slightness of the bond—the single highway of touch—that connected them with their fellow beings. Such a child, in almost as languageless a condition as a dog and with far less chance of finding out what was going on in the world and of participating therein, develops into a rational creature of just that special kind of rationality that even in its simplest terms the brightest dog seems never to achieve. And now consider what a slow and weary path this bright child, equipped with all its sense and senses, and at the expense of much patient teaching, must tread before it comprehends the message of the letters, and gets to look upon 'twice two is four' as something more than a rather stupid bit of memory exercise, that, like virtue, if persisted in, brings its own reward. With an inconceivably great start beyond the dog or the horse, with a tremendously greater aptitude for just this sort of mental acrobatics, the human child must await some years of ripening of its powers, and upon that favorable foundation expend some further years of initiation and schooling to exhibit a simple proficiency in getting meaning out of those crooked black marks on white paper, and in putting two and two together so as to comprehend the manner of its strange transformation into four. Surely, the accomplishment merits our profound admiration. To this understanding of how much is involved in bringing an apt mind to the point at which reading and calculating becomes a bare possibility, of how great a world is already conquered when the three E's begin to play even the most modest of parts, let us add one point more: When the child begins to show (and not wholly by language) that the letters and numbers have some meaning, it shows the fact so variously that we have constant means of testing how real its knowledge may be. We gain a pretty fair idea in each case, how far the accomplishment is a mere mechanical trick, or a really comprehended operation. Everywhere the limitations are conspicuously obvious; and we know how gradually we must add to the complexity of the business, how readily, by only a slight change in the setting of the problem, we sink the struggling mind beyond its depth. All this is a very sound lesson in psychology to take with us, when we attend a 'show' in which a horse or a dog is put through some steps which are supposed to prove for the star performer a real comprehension of the message of the letters and the operations of the multiplication-table.

With so much of preamble, let us look at the actual performance, first as it is presented on the show-bills, and then as it appears from behind the scenes. The program that advertises the learned