Part 14

Now began a period of diligent self-training in standing. As I sat on the grass and the baby played beside me, she would put her hands on my knee, lift herself to her feet, and balance on them as long as she could--seven seconds at the most, in the second week of the month, a quarter of a minute in the third, if her attention was called away from her own balance by some interesting sight. She would totter, stretch out her arms to recover her balance, circle with them just as we do (the movement must be highly instinctive), come down with a jolt and a peal of baby laughter, scramble to my knees, and up again. People are foolish to go to the matinée for amusement if they have a chance, instead, to sit flat on a lawn on a summer day, and assist at a baby’s standing lessons.

In these days there was evident again an intangible but great increase in the little one’s mental alertness, her eager curiosity in following our movements, her look of effort to understand, her growing clearness in grouping associations and interpreting what she saw.

Her handling of things had long developed into elaborate investigation, turning an object over and examining every side, poking her fingers into crevices, opening and shutting lids, turning over the leaves of books; and now she was no longer satisfied with investigating such objects as she came across by chance--she began to have a passion (which increased for weeks and months, and long made up a great part of her life) to go and find what there was to see. She crept to the window and stood at the low sill, to look out, beating the pane with her soft little hands and laughing in an ecstasy of delight if the dog wandered by. She crept into the hall and explored it, sitting down in each corner to take a survey, and to look up the walls above her. Her toys were neglected; she was impatient of being held in arms, and eager only to get to the floor and use her new powers. She crept happily about for hours from chair to chair, from person to person, getting to her feet at each, and setting herself cleverly down again; smiling and crowing at each success, and coming to us for applause and caresses. She did not want to leave the floor for her meals, and was reconciled to them only if she might stand at her mother’s side and take her milk or porridge in small doses, interspersed with play. She ran away from us on hands and knees, laughing, if she thought we were about to pick her up.

Outdoors her happiness was even greater than in the month before, and her cries of rapture as she looked up, down, and around, and realized her own activity in the midst of all the waving and shining and blooming things, were remarkable--uttered, as it were, from the very deeps of her little soul, with that impassioned straining of the central muscles by which a baby throws such abandon of longing or ecstasy into his voice. We seem to have lost the vivid expressiveness of primitive cries in getting the precision and convenience of articulate words.

The sights and sounds of outdoors now contributed greatly to the little girl’s joy there. She had for some weeks noticed sounds more than ever before--the tapping of a woodpecker, for instance, or the stamping of a horse in the stable--and now she was quick to look and listen at the note of a bird. She watched the birds, too, for the first time, as they flew from tree to tree; and the profuse California flowers were objects of incessant desire and pleasure.

The power of communication was considerably increased in this month by the acquisition of one exceedingly useful sign. The way in which it was developed is an interesting example of the evolution of such signs. First the baby began to use her forefinger tip for specially close investigations; at the same time she had a habit of stretching out her hand towards any object that interested her--by association, no doubt, with touching and seizing movements. Combining these two habits, she began to hold her forefinger separate from the others when she thus threw out her hand towards an interesting object; then, in the second week of the month, she directed this finger alone towards what interested her; and by the third week, the gesture of pointing was fairly in use. She pointed to the woodshed door, with her mewing cry, when she wished to see the kittens; to the garden door, with pleading sounds, when she wished to be taken thither; to the special bush from which she wished a rose. She pointed in answer, instead of merely looking, when we asked, “Where is grandpa?” “Where is Muzhik?”

These questions can hardly have been understood, as questions; but it was more than ever clear that she got some idea from a good deal that we said, and now by the words alone, without the help of gestures. Doubtless she knew several simple words--words of coming and going, of food, of the kittens and the dog and the horse.

All this time she had shown no great improvement in walking movements when held from above, and she had no particular ambition to walk. But in the last week of the month she began to edge along by the side of a chair, holding to it--a great advance.

The first attempts at climbing, too, appeared before she was quite ten months old. In the third week of the tenth month the baby had let herself down by her hands quite cleverly from a large chair in which she had been scrambling about--a feat that must have been quite instinctive, since she did it well and easily at the first try. The last day of the month, as she hovered at the foot of the stairs (a region about which she had much unsatisfied curiosity), some one helped her to put her knee on the lower step. Thereupon she laid hold on the next one, and pulled herself up, and with the same help, mounted two steps more. At this point her aunty’s stereotyped appeal, “Don’t help her! let her alone, and let me see what she will do!” prevailed. A candle was set on a higher step as a lure, and, sure enough, the little thing, unaided, set her knee on the higher level, laid hold with her hands, and drew herself up. It is significant that true climbing movements should be so early and so easily caught at a single partial lesson; and I shall have occasion to say more about it before the story of the baby’s first year closes.

In the very last days of the tenth month came a wonderful spring upward in the little one’s intelligence about her surroundings, and in her power of communicating with us. It involved the real beginning of spoken words--for the cat cry of the month before remained by itself, leading to nothing more, and though it was the first sound that expressed an idea, it was not from it, but from this later root, that spoken language sprang and grew.

But the mental and language progress of these few days, just as the baby came to ten months old, was the beginning of a stage of development that belonged to the later months--a beginning too important to be crowded in at the close of a chapter that is mainly concerned with movement development. So I keep the account of it for the story of the eleventh month.

XII

RUDIMENTS OF SPEECH; CLIMBING AND PROGRESS TOWARD WALKING

Talk before you go, Your tongue will be your overthrow,

says the old saw. But perhaps our baby did not earn the ill omen, it was such a faint foreshadowing of speech that she was guilty of. Probably she would not have been detected in it at all, had not ten months’ practice made us pretty good detectives. Indeed, but for the notebook, by which I could compare from day to day the wavering approach to some meaning in her use of this or that syllable, I should not have dared to be sure there really was a meaning. It is in these formless beginnings of a beginning that we get our best clues (as in all evolutionary studies) to the real secrets of the origin of language.

The little girl, as she came to ten months old, was a greater chatterer than ever, pouring out strings of meaningless syllables in joy or sorrow, with marvelous inflections and changes--such intelligent remarks as “Nĕ-nĕ-oom-bo,” and “Ga-boo-ng,” and “A-did-did-doo,” and certain favored syllables over and over, such as “Dă-dă-dă.”

In the last four days of the tenth month we began to suspect a faint consistency in the use of several of the most common sounds. We began to think that something like “Dă!” (varying loosely to “Gă!” or “Dng!” or “Did-dă!” or “Doo-doo!” but always hovering round plain “Dă!”) was suspiciously often ejaculated when the little one threw out her hand in pointing, or exulted in getting to her feet; that “Nă-nă-nă!” was separating itself out as a wail of unwillingness and protest, and “Mă-mă-mă!” as a whimper of discontent, and loneliness, and desire of attention; while--nearest of all to a true word--a favorite old murmur of “M-gm” or “Ng-gng” recurred so often when something disappeared from sight that we could not but wonder if we had not here an echo of our frequent “All gone!”

All these sounds were used often enough at other times, and other sounds were used in their special places; yet week by week the notebook showed “Dă!” growing into the regular expression of discovering, pointing out, admiring, exulting; “Nă-nă-nă!” into that of refusal and protest; and “Mă-mă-mă,” which soon became “Mom-mom-mom,” into that of a special sort of wanting, which slowly gathered itself about the mother in particular. I do not think that these were echoes of our words “There!” and “No!” and “Mamma;” it was only slowly, and after the baby was a year old, that they came into unison with these words--and in the case of “Mamma,” not without some teaching. It is more likely that we have here a natural cry of pointing out, a natural negative, a natural expression of baby need and dependence, which give us a hint of the origin of our own words.

The fourth sound, however, which developed through many variations (such as “M-gâ,” “Gâ,” or “Gng”) to a clear “Gông,” “A-gông,” and even “Gone,” was plainly an echo. It was used as loosely as it was pronounced: the baby murmured “Ng-gng!” pensively when some one left the room; when she dropped something; when she looked for something she could not find; when she had swallowed a mouthful of food; when she heard a door close. She wounded her father’s feelings by commenting “M-gâ!” as her little hands wandered about the unoccupied top of his head. She remarked “Gông!” when she slipped back in trying to climb a step; when she failed to loosen a cord she wished to play with; when she saw a portière, such as she was used to hide behind; when she was refused a bottle she had begged for. It meant disappearance, absence, failure, denial, and any object associated with these.

In just this fashion, Preyer’s boy used his first word of human speech, at about this age. “Atta!” the little fellow would murmur when some one left the room, or when the light went out--using a favorite old babble of his own, just as our baby did, to help him get hold of a grown-up word, “Adieu” or “Ta-ta,” which carried the meaning he was after. The idea of disappearance--of the thing now seen, now gone--seems to take strong hold on babies very early; I have known several other cases.

In all this we seem to see quite clearly the first steps in language making. The baby begins slowly to turn some of his commonest chattering sounds to special uses--not to carry thought to other people, but as mere exclamations to relieve his own mind. It was just twice within her first year that our baby turned to me when some one left the room, looked in my face, and said “Gông!” At all other times it was only murmured to herself. And most of the exclamations express a mood rather than a real idea; they are halfway between mere cries and words proper. Even when there is plainly an idea, as in “All gone,” it is a big, vague blur of an idea, slowly taking form in the little mind, as the blurs of light and dark slowly outlined themselves into objects before the little eyes months before.

At this point the modern baby catches the trick of helping himself to our words ready made, and (though many glimpses of primitive speech show through the whole process of learning to talk) he thus saves himself in the main the long task of developing them, through which his ancestors toiled.

In fact, the next word our baby took into use, a fortnight later, was lifted bodily from our speech: a reproving “Kha!” by which we tried to disgust her with the state of her fingers after they had been plunged into apple sauce or like matters. She quite understood what it referred to, though she did not share our objection to messy fingers, and thereafter surveyed her own complacently in such plight, and commented, “Kha!” And I may here run ahead so far as to say that this was the full list of her spoken words within the first year, except that in the next month she used an assenting “Ĕ!” which may have been “Yes;” and in the last days of the year she began to exclaim first “By!” then “My!” (corrupted from “By-by”) in saying farewell.

During this fortnight of swift language development the little one’s progress in movements had been slight. But towards the middle of the eleventh month she took a fresh start. One day she raised herself to her feet without anything to hold to; stood on tiptoe to peer over the seat of her high chair; forgot to hold to me, in her eagerness for a fruit I was peeling, and stood alone for a minute and a half at least, while I peeled it and fed it into her mouth; clambered into my lap (as I sat beside her on the floor), setting one little foot up first, laying hold of my shoulder, and tugging herself up with mighty efforts.

She chanced, too, on the art of shoving a chair before her for a step or two; and the next day, in her eagerness to reach a glass of water her father was bringing, she took one unconscious forward step, which ended in prompt collapse on the lawn. But neither of these beginnings was followed up by any real advance in learning to walk. During the rest of the month she edged about more freely, and in the last week pushed chairs before her a little again; and if we supported her and urged her forward, she would walk clumsily, much as a puppy will if you lead him by the fore paws; but she seemed to find the movement scarcely more natural than the puppy does, and always wanted soon to drop down to all-fours.

But climbing was a different matter. Here the baby seemed laid hold of by strong desire and instinct. The day after she climbed into my lap, she spent a long time zealously climbing up a doorstep and letting herself down backward from it. The day after that, she tackled the stairs and climbed two steps. Later in the day, I set her at the bottom of the stairs and moved slowly up before her. The little thing followed after (her mother’s arms close behind, of course; no one would be crazy enough to start a baby upstairs without such precaution), tugging from step to step, grunting with exertion now and then, and exclaiming with satisfaction at each step conquered; slipping back once or twice, but undiscouraged--fifteen steps to the landing, where she pulled to her feet by the stair-post, hesitated, made a motion to creep down head first, then crept, laughing, across the landing, and up five steps more, and shouted with triumph to find herself on the upper floor. She even looked with ambition at the garret stairs, and started towards them; but an open door tempted her aside to explore a room, and she forgot the stairs.

For the rest of the month the baby dropped to hands and knees and scrabbled joyously for the stairs at every chance of open door; she was not satisfied without going up several times daily; and having people who believed in letting her do things, and insuring her safety by vigilance while she did them, instead of by holding her back, she soon became expert and secure in mounting. She made assaults, too, on everything that towered up and looked in the least climbable--boxes, chairs, and all sorts of things, quite beyond her present powers. She seemed possessed by a sort of blind compulsion towards the upward movement.

What are we to make of this strong climbing impulse, this untaught skill in putting up the foot or knee and pulling the body up, while walking is still unnatural? I sought out every record I could find, and the indications are that our baby was not an exception; that as a rule climbing does come before walking, if a baby is left free to develop naturally. Of course in many cases walking is artificially hastened and climbing prevented.