Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/150

130 cries and exclamations, consisting exclusively of vowel-sounds; this continued several months.

By degrees consonants were added to the vowels, and the exclamations became more and more articulate. This process resulted in a sort of prattle of great diversity and completeness, which would be kept up for a quarter of an hour at a time, and repeated ten times a day. The sounds (vowel and consonant), which at first were vague and very hard to discriminate, became more and more like those uttered by adults, and the series of simple cries came to be, in some measure, like a foreign language which we do not understand. The infant is pleased with its prattle, like a bird; one can see that she is happy—that she smiles with pleasure—yet it is nothing better than the chirruping of a bird as yet, for the child does not attach any meaning to the sounds she utters. (Age, twelve months).

She has acquired thus much, in great measure, by her own endeavors and unassisted, but she has gained a little by the aid of others and by imitation. First, of her own accord she produced the sound mm; this amused her—it was for her a discovery. So, too, she of herself produced another sound, kraaau, emitted from the windpipe in deep gutturals. These two sounds were repeated several times in succession in the hearing of the child; she would listen attentively, and now she repeats them at once on hearing them. The same is to be said of the sound papapapa, which she at first uttered several times at random and by herself, and which was then repeated to her a number of times, in order to fix it in her memory. She soon uttered this sound at will, with easy, unerring execution (though without understanding what it meant), as simple prattle. In short, example and education have served only to call the child's attention to sounds which she herself was already attempting to make; to direct her preference to these, to make them uppermost among the host of similar sounds. But the initiative all came from herself; and the same is to be said with respect to gesture. For months she of her own accord attempted all the movements of the arms, flexion of the hand at the wrist, bringing the hands together, etc. Then, after instruction and repeated effort, she learned to clap hands, to hold up the two hands, as in the gesture of astonishment, etc. Example, instruction, and education, are only channels in the bed of which the stream flows; its source lies higher.

To see that this is the case, one has only to listen to her prattle for an hour: it is wonderfully flexible. I am satisfied that here every shade of emotion—surprise, joy, vexation, sadness—finds expression in varieties of tone; herein she equals or even surpasses the adult. On comparing her with animals, even those best endowed in this way—such as the dog, parrot, singing-birds—I find that, with a less-extended gamut of sounds, she far surpasses them in the fineness and the abundance of her expressive intonations. Delicacy of impressions and