unusual one for grown persons of
average intelligence and education.

Holden now determined in the most careful manner the words actually used
by two children during the twenty-fourth month of their lives. A friend
in England ascertained the same for a third child. All doubtful words
were rigidly excluded. For example, words from nursery rhymes were
excluded, unless they were independently and separately used in the same
way with words of daily and common use. In the first two cases the words
so excluded are above 500 in number. Again, the names of objects
represented in pictures were not included unless they were often
spontaneously used by the children. The lists of words are presented in
the order of their initial letters, because the ease or difficulty of
pronouncing a word, the author is convinced, largely determines its
early or late adoption. In this I can not fully agree with him, on the
ground of my own experience (particularly since I have myself been
teaching my child English, in his fourth year; he learns the language
easily). It is not correct that the pronunciation rather than the
meaning makes the learning of a word difficult. Thus, in all three of
Holden's cases, the words that have the least easy initial (s)
predominate; the child, however, avoided them and substituted easy ones.
Holden makes no mention of this; and in his list of all the words used
he puts together, strangely, under one and the same letter, without
regard to their sound-(phonic) value, vocables that begin with entirely
different sounds. Thus, e. g., under _c_ are found _corner_ (_k_),
_chair_ (tsch), _cellar_ (_s_); under _k_, actually _knee_ (_n_) and
_keep_ (_k_), and, under _s_, words that begin with the same _s_-sound
as in _cellar_, e. g., _soap_, and also words beginning with the
_sch_-sound, _sugar_, and with _st_, _sw_, _sm_, and many others. As the
words of the three children are grouped, not according to the _sounds_
with which they begin, but according to their initial _letters_, into
twenty-six classes, the author's conclusions can not be admitted. The
words must first all be arranged according to their initial _sounds_.
When this task is accomplished, which brings _no_ and _know_, e. g.,
into one class, _wrap_ and _rag_ into a second--whereas they were put in
four different classes--then we find by no means the same order of
succession that Holden gives. The author wrote to me, however, in 1882,
that his oldest child _und