teach her to
come to the dining-room when the dinner bell rang. It took a long time,
but I succeeded in the end. In her vacant intellect a vague correlation
was established between sound and taste, a correspondence between the
two senses, an appeal from one to the other, and consequently a sort
of connection of ideas--if one can call that kind of instinctive hyphen
between two organic functions an idea--and so I carried my experiments
further, and taught her, with much difficulty, to recognize meal times
by the clock.

"It was impossible for me for a long time to attract her attention to
the hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the
striking apparatus. The means I employed were very simple; I asked them
not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into
the dining-room when the little brass hammer struck twelve o'clock, but
I found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes. She
ran to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she
learned that all the strokes had not the same value as far as regarded
meals, and she frequently fixed her eyes, guided by her ears, on the
dial of the clock.

"When I noticed that, I took care every day at twelve, and at six
o'clock, to place my fingers on the figures twelve and six, as soon as
the moment she was waiting for had arrived, and I soon noticed that she
attentively followed the motion of the small brass hands, which I had
often turned in her presence.

"She had understood! Perhaps I ought rather to say that she had grasped
the idea. I had succeeded in getting the knowledge, or, rather, the
sensation, of the time into her, just as is the case with carp, who
certainly have no clocks, when they are fed every day exactly at the
same time.

"When once I had obtained that result all the clocks and watches in the
house occupied her attention almost exclusively. She spent her time in
looking at them, listening to them, and in waiting for meal time, and
once something very funny happened. The striking apparatus of a pretty
little Louis XVI clock that hung at the head of her bed having got out
of order, she noticed it. She sat for twenty minutes with her eyes on
the hands, waiting for it to strike ten, but when the hands passed the
figure she was astonished at not hearing anything; so stupefied was she,
indeed, that she sat down, no doubt overwhelmed by a feeling of violent
emotion such as attacks us in th