286. Taste, as involved in the necessary act of taking nourishment, is probably at first hardly differentiated from touch.
287. The clear recognition of individual objects is said to show itself in average cases from about the sixth month (Tracy, op. cit., pp. 15-16).
288. With the smile there ought perhaps to be taken the infantile crow.
289. Darwin puts the first true smile on the forty-fifth day. The first quasi-smiles are probably quite mechanical and destitute of meaning.
290. See above, p. 195 and p. 308.
292. Darwin tells us that his boy uttered a rude kind of laugh when only one hundred and ten days old, after a pinafore had been thrown over his head and suddenly withdrawn. C.’s sense of humour was hardly as precocious as this.
293. Preyer’s boy perfected the action in the fifth month. For differences in precocity here, see F. Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, pp. 12, 13.
294. This should be read in connexion with Study V.
295. This rather bald account of early vocal sounds should be contrasted with those of Preyer and others referred to in Study V.
296. Perez speaks of both the affirmative and negative movement of the head appearing about the fifteenth month (First Three Years of Childhood, Engl. transl., p. 21). Darwin finds that the sign of affirmation (nodding) is less uniform among the different races of men than that of negation. According to Preyer, while the gesture of negation appears under the form of a turning away or declining movement as an instinct in the first days of life, the accepting gesture of nodding (which afterwards becomes the sign of affirmation) is acquired and appears much later (see his full account of the growth of these movements, Die Seele des Kindes, p. 242).
297. Cf. above, p. 148 ff.
298. The supposition that ‘Ningi’ was easy seems reasonable. First of all it is in part a reduplication like his later name ‘Kikkie’. Again, we know that children often add the final y or ie sound, as in saying ‘dinnie’ for dinner, ‘beddie’ for bread. Once more, from the early appearances of ‘ng’ sound in ‘ang,’ ‘ung,’ etc., we may infer it to be easy. Indeed, one observer (Dr. Champneys) tells us that an infant’s cry is exactly represented by the sound ‘ngä’ as pronounced in Germany (Mind, vi., p. 105).
299. See above, p. 157 f.
300. It has been found that the sensations of hot and cold are readily confused even by adults.
301. I think this supposition more probable than that the child saw the whole form—hull, masts and sails—as a triangle.
302. He had been at the sea-side a year before this, but there was no evidence of his having remembered it.
304. I find that another little boy when two years old used ‘two’ in this way for more than one.
306. See above, p. 173.
308. See above, p. 19 f.
310. Later on towards the end of the year he oddly enough seemed disposed to reverse his early practice, using for example ‘she’ for ‘her,’ and even going to the length of correcting his sister for saying ‘Somebody gave her,’ by remarking with all the dogmatism of the most pedantic of grammarians, “No, E., you must say ‘Gave she’”.
311. Compare above, p. 176 f. C.’s father probably makes too much of the principle of economy here. Thus, like other children, the boy was wont to use double negatives, e.g., “Dare isn’t no water in dat cup,” where there is clearly a redundance.redundance.
313. On the use of antithesis in children’s language and on the early forms of negation, see above, p. 174 f.
314. A note in the diary says that C.’s sister had also used ‘this morning’ in a similar way for any present. Can this curious habit arise, he asks, from the circumstance that children hear ‘this morning’ more frequently than ‘this afternoon’ and ‘this evening,’ or that they are more wakeful and observant in the early part of the day?
315. (Note of the father.) C., on leaving D——, had travelled by the train. He may, therefore, have intended merely to say “removed from sight through the agency of the locomotive”. From other examples, however, it would look as if the boy meant to explain all disappearance as a removal from his own local sphere.
316. The chronicler observes here that C.’s sister had also used the same expression for ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ viz., “my”. It looks as if the me and its belongings were not at first differentiated. Even of the later and maturer ideas of self a well-known American psychologist writes: “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw”. Compare above, p. 181.
317. The same holds true of ‘me,’ which was first used only in particular connexions, as ‘Give me’.
328. On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to heaven, see above, p. 120 ff.
329. According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month (quoted by Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 55). But of course this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the right hand from the left.