retarded, just as the marvellous instinct of the wild animals becomes less efficient in captivity.

The grasping phase is but a preliminary to more complex activities. Just as in schooldays we were taught with much labour to make pot-hooks and hangers efficiently before we were promoted to real attempts at writing, so before the child can really perform tasks with a definite meaning and purpose, he must learn to control the finer movements of his hands. Once the grasping phase, the stage of pot-hooks, is successfully past—and the end of the second year in a well-managed child should see its close—the child sets himself with enthusiasm to wider tasks. To him washing and dressing, fetching his shoes and buttoning his gaiters, all the processes of his simple little life, should be matters of the most enthralling interest, in which he is eager to take his part and increasingly capable of doing so. In the Montessori system there is provided an elaborate apparatus, the didactic material, designed to cultivate tactile sensation and the perception of sense stimuli. It will generally suffice to advise the mother to make use of the ordinary apparatus of the nursery. The imitativeness of the young child is so great that he will repeat in almost every detail all the actions of his nurse as she carries out the daily routine. At eighteen months of age, when the electric light is turned on in his nursery, the child will at once go to the curtains and make attempts to draw them. At the same age a little girl will weigh her doll in her own weighing-machine, will take every precaution that the nurse takes in her own case, and will even stoop down anxiously to peer at the dial, just as she has seen her mother and nurse do on the weekly weighing night. But at a very early age children appreciate the difference between the real and the make-believe. They desire above all things to do acts of real service. At the age of two a child should know where every article for the nursery table is kept. He will fetch the tablecloth and help to put it in place, spoons and cups and saucers will be carried carefully to the table, and when the meal is over he will want to help to clear it all away. All this is to him a great delight, and the good nurse will encourage it in the children, because she sees that in doing so they gain quickness and dexterity and poise of body. The first purposive movements of the child should be welcomed and encouraged. It is foolish and wrong to repress them, as many nurses do, because the child in his attempts gets in the way, and no doubt for a time delays rather than expedites preparations. The child who is made to sit immobile in his chair while everything is done for him is losing precious hours of learning and of practice. It is useless, and to my mind a little distasteful, to substitute for all this wonderful child activity the artificial symbolism of the kindergarten school in which children are taught to sing songs or go through certain semi-dramatic activities which savour too much of a performance acquired by precise instruction. If such accomplishments are desired, they may be added to, but they must not replace, the more workaday activities of the little child. The child whose impulses towards purposive action are encouraged is generally a happy child, with a mind at rest. When those impulses are restrained, mental unrest and irritability are apt to appear, and toys and picture books and kindergarten games will not be sufficient to restore his natural peace of mind.

We may pass from considering the imitativeness of the child to study a second and closely related quality, his suggestibility. His conception of himself as a separate individual, of his ego, only gradually emerges. It is profoundly modified by ideas derived from those around him. Because of his lack of acquired experience, there is in the child an extreme sensitiveness to impressions from outside. Take, for example, a matter that is sometimes one of great difficulty, the child's likes and dislikes for food. Many mothers make complaint that there are innumerable articles of diet which the child will not take: that he will not drink milk, or that he will not eat fat, or meat, or vegetables, or milk puddings. There are people who believe that these peculiarities of taste correspond with idiosyncrasies of digestion, and that children instinctively turn from what would do them harm. I do not believe that there is much truth in this contention. If we watch an infant after weaning, at the time when his diet is gradually being enlarged to include more solid food, with new and varied flavours, we may see his attention arrested by the strange sensations. With solid or crisp food there may be a good deal of hesitation and fumbling before he sets himself to masticate and swallow. With the unaccustomed flavour of gravy or fruit juice there may be seen on his face a look of hesitation or surprise. In the stolid and placid child these manifestations are as a rule but little marked, and pleasurable sensations clearly predominate. With children of more nervous temperament it is clear that sensations of taste are much more acute. Even in earliest infancy, children have a way of proclaiming their nervous inheritance by the repugnance which they show to even trifling changes in the taste or composition of their food. We see the same sensitiveness in their behaviour to medicines. The mixture which one child will swallow without resentment, and almost eagerly, provokes every expression of disgust from another, or is even vomited at once. In piloting the child through this phase, during which he starts nervously at all unaccustomed sensations and flavours, the attitude of mother and nurse is of supreme importance. It is unwise to attempt force; it is equally unwise, by excessive coaxing, cajoling, and entreaty, to concentrate the child's attention on the matter. If either is tried every meal is apt to become a signal for struggling and tears. The phase, whether it is short or long continued, must be accepted as in the natural order of things, and patience will see its end. The management of this symptom,—refusal of food and an apparently complete absence of desire for food,—which is almost the commonest neurosis of childhood, will be dealt with later. Here it is mentioned because I wish to emphasise that if too much is made of a passing hesitation over any one article of food, if it becomes the belief of the mother or nurse that a strong distaste is present, then if she is not careful her attitude in offering it, because she is apprehensive of refusal, will exert a powerful suggestion on the child's mind. Still worse, it may cause words to be used in the child's hearing referring to this peculiarity of his. By frequent repetition it becomes fixed in his mind that this is part of his own individuality. He sees himself—and takes great pleasure in the thought—as a strange child, who by these peculiarities creates considerable interest in the minds of the grown-up people around him. When the suggestion takes root it becomes fixed, and as likely as not it will persist for his lifetime. It may be habitually said of a child that, unlike his brothers and sisters, he will never eat bananas, and thereafter till the day of his death he may feel it almost a physical impossibility to gulp down a morsel of the offending fruit. So, too, there are people who can bolt their food with the best of us, who yet declare themselves incapable of swallowing a pill.

Another example of the force of suggestion, whether unconscious or openly exercised by speech, is given us in the matter of sleep. Among adults the act of going to bed serves as a powerful suggestion to