29th month.—Sad stories affect him to tears, and he runs away.
Names of animals and plants he remembers often more easily than I do, and informs me. He reasons logically. Lately, when he asked for some foolish thing, I said to him, "Sha'n't I bring the moon for you, too?" No, said he, you can't do that, it is too high up in the clouds.
30th to 33d months.—He now often calls himself "Adolph," and then speaks of himself in the third person. He frequently confounds "I" and "you," and does not so consistently use the first person for the second, and the reverse. The transition is very gradually taking place to the correct use of the personal pronoun. Instead of my mamma, he repeats often, when he is in an affectionate mood, your mamma, your mamma.
Some new books are given to him. In the book of beetles there are shown to him the party-colored and the gray, so-called "sad," grave-digger (necrophorus). The latter now becomes prominent in his plays. "Why is he called the sad?" I asked the child yesterday. Ah! because he has no children, he answered, sorrowfully. Probably he has at some time overheard this sentence, which has no meaning for him, from a grown person. Adult persons' ways of speaking are thus employed without an understanding of them; pure verbal memory.
In the same way, he retains the names, in his new book, of butterflies (few of them German) better than I do, however crabbed and difficult they may be.
This (pure) memory for mere sounds or tones has become less strong in the now four-year-old boy, who has more to do with ideas and concepts, although his memory in other respects is good.
In the thirty-seventh month he sang, quite correctly, airs he had heard, and he could sing some songs to the piano, if they were frequently repeated with him. His fancy for this soon passed away, and these exercises ceased. On the other hand, he tells stories a great deal and with pleasure. His pronunciation is distinct, the construction of the sentences is mostly correct, apart from errors acquired from his nurse. The confounding of the first and second persons, the "I" and "you," or rather his use of the one for the other, has ceased, and the child designates himself by I, others by thou and you. Men are ordinarily addressed by him with thou, as his father and uncle are; women with you, as are even his mother and nurse. This continues for a long time. The boy of four years counts objects, with effort, up to six; numbers remain for a long time merely empty words (pp. 165, 172). In the same way, he has, as yet, but small 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. Æsop'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.