notion of the order of the days of the week, and
mixes up the names of them. To-day, to-morrow, yesterday, have
gradually become more intelligible to him.

Notwithstanding the aphoristic character of these extracts from a full
and detailed diary of observations, I have thought they ought to be
given, because they form a valuable supplement to my observations in the
nineteenth chapter, and show particularly how far independent thought
may be developed, even in the second and third years, while there is, as
yet, small knowledge of language. The differences in mental development
between this child and mine are no less worthy of notice than are the
agreements. Among the latter is the fact, extremely important in a
pedagogical point of view, that, the less we teach the child the simple
truth from the beginning, so much the easier it is to inoculate him
permanently with religious notions, i. e., of "miraculous revelation."
Fairy tales, ghost-stories, and the like easily make the childish
imagination, of itself very active, hypertrophic, and cloud the judgment
concerning actual events. Morals and nature offer such an abundance of
facts with which we may connect the teaching of language, that it is
better to dispense with legends. AEsop's fables combine the moral and the
natural in a manner unsurpassable. My child tells me one of these fables
every morning.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] The vowels have the Continental, not the English, sounds.

[E] Or possibly for the word _drink_, which a child of my acquaintance
called _ghing_.--EDITOR.

[F] "The First Three Years of Childhood," edited and translated by Alice
M. Christie; published in Chicago, 1885.

B.

NOTES CONCERNING LACKING, DEFECTIVE, AND ARRESTED MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN
THE FIRST YEARS OF LIFE.

The data we have concerning the behavior of children born, living,
without head or without brain, and of microcephalous children, as well
as of idiots and cretins more advanced in age, are of great interest, as
helping us to a knowledge of the dependence of the first psychical
processes upon the development of the brain, especially of the cerebral
cortex. Unfortunately, these data are scanty and scattered.

Very important, too, for psychogenesis, are reports concerning the
physiological condition and activity of children whose mental
development has seemed to be stopped for months, or to be made
considerably slower, or to be unusually hastened.

Scanty as are the notes