the one hand, the lessening in size; on the other hand,
the noise. The patience with which this occupation--from the
forty-fifth to the fifty-fifth week especially--is continued with
pleasure is explained by the gratification at being a cause, at the
perception that so striking a transformation as that of the
newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own
activity. Other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again
and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the
shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or
purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the
filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the
strewing about of garden-mold or gravel; the turning of the leaves
of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month); digging and scraping in
the sand; the carrying of footstools hither and thither; the placing
of shells, stones, or buttons in rows (twenty-first month); pouring
water into and out of bottles, cups, watering-pots (thirty-first to
thirty-third months); and, in the case of my boy, the throwing of
stones into the water. A little girl in the eleventh month found her
chief pleasure in "rummaging" with trifles in drawers and little
boxes. Her sister "played" with all sorts of things, taking an
interest in dolls and pictures in the tenth month (Frau von
Struempell). Here, too, the eagerness and seriousness with which
such apparently aimless movements are performed is remarkable.
The satisfaction they afford must be very great, and it probably
has its basis in the feeling of his own power generated by the
movements originated by the child himself (changes of place, of
position, of form) and in the proud feeling of being a cause.

This is not mere playing, although it is so called; it is
_experimenting_. The child that at first merely played like a cat,
being amused with color, form, and movement, has become a _causative
being_. Herewith the development of the _"I"-feeling_ enters upon a
new phase; but it is not yet perfected. Vanity and ambition come in
for the further development of it. Above all, it is _attention_ to
the _parts of his own body_ and the _articles of his dress_, the
nearest of all objects to the child's eye, that helps along the
separation in thought of the child's body from all other objects.

I therefore made special observation of the directing of his look toward
his own body and toward the mirror. In reg