nd higher
above the dependent condition of the animal, so that at last the
difference, not recognizable at all before birth and hardly
recognizable at the beginning after birth, between animal and human
being attains a magnitude dangerous for the latter, attains it,
above all, by means of language.

But if it is necessary for the child to appropriate to himself as
completely as possible this highest privilege of the human race and
through this to overcome the animal nature of his first period; if his
development requires the stripping off of the remains of the animal and
the unfolding of the responsible "I"--then it will conduce to the
highest satisfaction of the thinking man, at the summit of his
experience of life, to go back in thought to his earliest childhood, for
that period teaches him plainly that he himself has his origin in
nature, is intimately related to all other living creatures. However far
he gets in his development, he is ever groping vainly in the dark for a
door into another world; but the very fact of his reflecting upon the
possibility of such a door shows how high the developed human being
towers above all his fellow-beings.

The key to the understanding of the great enigma, how these extremes are
connected, is furnished in the history of the development of the mind of
the child.

APPENDIXES.

A.

COMPARATIVE OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE ACQUIREMENT OF SPEECH BY GERMAN
AND FOREIGN CHILDREN.

Among the earlier as among the later statements concerning the
acquirement of speech, there are several that have been put forth by
writers on the subject without a sufficient basis of observed facts. Not
only Buffon, but also Taine and his successors, have, from a few
individual cases, deduced general propositions which are not of general
application.

Good observations were first supplied in Germany by Berthold Sigismund
in his pamphlet, "Kind und Welt" ("The Child and the World") (1856); but
his observations were scanty.

He noted, as the first articulate sounds made by a child from Thueringen
(Rudolstadt), _ma_, _ba_, _bu_, _appa_, _ange_, _anne_, _brrr_, _arrr_:
these were made about the middle of the first three months.

Sigismund is of the opinion that this first lisping, or babbling,
consists in the production of syllables with only two sounds, of which
the consonant is most often the first; that the first consonants
distinctly pronounced are labials; that the lips, brought into acti