{76 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
very early in her possession of speech she rejoiced to turn over the pages 
of books, naming the pictures she could, and setting down the others under 
the general title, ‘“ picture.” 
At all times the power of delicate distinctions in speech was far beyond 
what her general mental development would have seemed to warrant. So 
it is with all babies. By what process of reasoning does a two-year-old 
baby manage so abstract a signification as that of a personal pronoun ? 
How should he observe so delicately that we say “1” of ourselves, ¢“ you” 
so others; and instead of literally imitating, calling himself “you,” 
follow the analogy intelligently ? Yet a dozen distinctions as philosophic 
(if not always this particular one), as impossible without help from 
ancient race-habit, the baby will make at an age when you can barely 
coax the bungling little fingers to string a bead. 
Midway in her second year the application of names to colors—for 
which as mere sense impressions she had not greatly cared—opened a wide 
deld of interest to the little girl I speak of ; and with a like exercise in 
naming the forms, plane and solid, made the chief indoor happiness of 
she rest of the year. The key of the word opened her eyes to notice the 
color or the form ; it visibly enabled her to put the sense impression away 
in her mind in available place, and to recognize its counterpart when she 
saw it, instead of passing blindly by. When she stood on a chair by my 
shelf, and pulled the books off and dropped them on the bed beside, the 
mere mechanical exercise was renewed in interest as she spontaneously 
named over the colors : ¢‘ That red book ; that book black ; that green.” 
She waked suddenly one day, in her twenty-second month, with a 
shout of joy, to the discovery that the walls, the doors, the furnishings 
about her, carried the well-known plane forms ; she rejoiced thenceforth 
in finding and naming them. ¢ Oblong over there !” she would shout, 
pointing to the door panels. She made people turn and smile in the cars 
with the sudden joy of her discovery of a ¢“ cunning little square” in the 
paneling ; or in a store with her loud and jubilant enumeration of ¢“ Red 
stocking ! Blue stocking ! Black stocking! Pink shirt! White shirt ! 
Green box !” 
By the time she was a year and a half old, stories and verses from 
which she could have got little but gleams of clear meaning enveloped in 
a cloud of vague suggestions, were liked by her, preferred to many 
things that were more definite to her. Yet this is probably less true of 
her than of most well-born and well-tended children, for she is un- 
usually matter-of-fact. That most such children by the third or fourth 
year do get much in the way of an atmosphere, an elusive beauty and 
suggestion, an invaluable glimpse of a beyond, from words that are out- 
side their comprehension, seems to me indisputable. One three-year-old 
friend of mine took great pleasure in reciting Blake’s ‘“ Piping down the 
vallevs wild.” She could not have understood 1t—anvy more than the rest