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THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF THE CHILD. 
BY MISS MILLICENT W. SHINN. EDITRESS OF OBERLIN MONTHLY. 
THE baby, coming to his third or fourth year, reaches the extreme 
frontier line of any region thus far annexed by pedagogy. He is described 
and discussed abundantly—if somewhat loosely—and yet of him but little 
18 known by the teacher or the psychologist. With what powers, what 
nterests, what prepossessions, does he come ? What difference would it 
make in our systems of earliest education if we knew ? Did Froebel or 
James Mill map a system most in accord with the real psychology of the 
;hree-year-old ? The first practical application likely to be made of 
recorded observations of babies under two or three years old will be to 
he answering of such questions as these. 
What capacity, for instance, has the two-year-old for understanding 
color, form, number, time ? What memory ? What reasoning power ? A 
baby girl of whose development I kept close record, a bright, healthy, 
matter-of-fact child, of no unusual powers that I could see, found it play 
to learn to name and recognize everywhere the colors and the principal 
plane forms before she was two years old ; before she was a year old, her 
grandmother taught her to recognize ¢“ O ” on a block or a card, and she 
found a ‘“Q” on another card, and held it up, expressing by questioning 
sounds her wonder what this was that so resembled ¢ 0,” yet differed from 
it. Yet this same baby, who could discriminate at eleven months so 
small a difference in form as the quirl of a ¢¢ Q,” could not comprehend, far 
on into the third year, so conspicuous a division of time as a day, nor use 
time words with any intelligence. ‘How long did baby sleep ?” ¢ Two- 
fee week.” “How long ago did you go to the city?” ¢*Two-fee 
minute.” And ‘“ When ?” would be answered as indiscriminately, ¢¢ Next 
year,” or ¢¢ Six o’clock.” 
If color and form are usually so easy to a baby, time so incomprehen- 
sible, we ought to know it. Why should we withhold till the later and 
more crowded years the one knowledge, if the baby is able to receive it 
with ease and joy and find life the more interesting for it, while we daily 
take for granted an inborn comprehension of the other, to which the 
mind is really dark ? 
So again : Does the baby really, as we are perpetually told, grasp first 
she individual, the special, the concrete ? 
The first word that Preyer’s baby volunteered was A¢-fa, and it meant 
disappearance, departure, and all associated therewith. The little girl 
[ studied used as her first word A4/l-gone, in a highly generalized sense. 
She said it when an object was put out of sight ; when one was denied her ; 
when she saw an object that had been denied her ;: when she swallowed a