hen
left to himself without any direction of his attention, then not
infrequently new imitations of sounds would be given correctly--e. g.,
when I said "bo"--but these, again, would no longer succeed when called
for. Indeed, such attempts often broke down utterly at once. Thus the
child once heard a hen making a piteous outcry, without seeing the
creature, and he tried in vain to imitate the sound, but once only, and
not again. On the other hand, he often succeeds in repeating correctly
movements of the tongue made for him to see, as the thrusting out of the
tongue between the lips, by reason of the extraordinary mobility of his
tongue and lips; he even tries to smack in imitation. The more frequent
partial contractions of the tongue, without attempts at speaking, are
especially surprising. On one side, toward the middle of the tongue,
rises a longitudinal swelling; then the edges are brought together, so
that the tongue almost forms a closed tube; again, it is turned
completely back in front. Such flexibility as this hardly belongs to the
tongue of any adult. Besides, the lips are often protruded a good deal,
even when this is not required in framing vocables.

The gain in the understanding of words heard is recognizable in this,
that when the child hears the appropriate word, he takes hold, with
thumb and forefinger, in a most graceful manner, of nose, mouth, beard,
forehead, chin, eye, ear, or touches them with the thumb. But in doing
this he often confounds ear and eye, chin and forehead, even nose and
ear. "O" serves in place of "Ohr" (ear); "Au" in place of "Auge" (eye).
In both cases the child soon discovered that these organs are in pairs,
and he would seize with the right hand the lobe of my left and of my
right ear alternately after I had asked "Ear?" How easily in such cases
a new sound-impression causes confusion is shown by the following fact:
After I had at one time pointed out one ear, and had said, "Other ear,"
I succeeded, by means of repetition, in getting him to point out this
other one also correctly every time. Now, then, the thing was to apply
what had been learned to the eye. When one eye had been pointed out, I
asked, "Where is the other eye?" The child grasped at an ear, with the
sight of which the sound "other" was now associated. Not till long after
(in the twentieth month) did he learn to apply this sound of himself to
different parts of the body. On the other hand, he understands perfectly
t