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KATH. c. MOORE, The Mental Development of a Child. 411 movement is a striking one, and should prompt to further inves- tigation. There is a neat little account of the genesis of a gesture-movement, viz. : "a lateral chopping motion of one or both arms " which served as a sign of dismissal in the twentieth month. It was, we are told, at first an imitation of the mother's action in brushing away the flies which came round the food (p. 31). It would be interesting to know whether imitation often contributes in this way to a child's gesture-language. There are, further, some valuable observations on the first localisation of sounds. Although the boy, as the result of the parents' play-like experiments, proved that he could recognise the direction of sounds in the forty-eighth week, he could at the time have had hardly any aural perception of distance. This seems to be shown by the fact that six weeks later "in calling to a dog at some distance he scarcely raised his voice above a whisper " (pp. 66, 7). Apropos of the growth of the visual perception of distance it is noted that before the sixty-eighth week the boy had no perception of dis- tance below his own level. It was only in the seventieth week that he learned to go down stairs (p. 110). This touches a neg- lected side of the visual perception of distance. As a last example I may take the observation of the first localisation of pain. This, according to Mrs. Moore, followed and depended on the localisation of dermal sensation. Internal pains are said to have been localised on the surface of the body, but here I suspect there is an opening for error in interpretation. Other points dealt with in a suggestive way are motor-reactions viewed as a measure of the intensity of sensations (p. 54) (Mrs. Moore rightly views motor-reactions as an element in perception, p. 59) ; the first appearance of "associations of similarity" (pp. 93, 4); and the slow process by which a child acquires the knowledge of so large and complex an object as the human figure (p. 99). I hope that I may have succeeded in showing that Mrs. Moore's monograph, in spite of its defects, contains much that is at once readable and valuable. I am disposed to think that her boy was exceptional in more than one particular. In respect of early and what may be called sub-voluntary movement he was, if the obser- vations are correctly interpreted, distinctly precocious ; yet in other ways he strikes one as backward. When, for example, we are told that there was no connexion of ideas with words during the first year (p. 95), one must infer either that the boy was almost abnormally slow, or that ' words ' here mean his own spoken words. The record of the child's language, which is very slight, bears out the conjecture that his intellectual development was tardy. A bird has been confused with a fly by other children, no doubt from want of a clear perception of distance ; but the calling of a cow a bird if the cow was anywhere near the child seems to argue unusual want of discernment. Mrs. Moore ingenuously suggests that the extension to the cow of the name " bird " rather than of "dog" was the result of a temporary fondness for the