therefore, be alike in
different children. The daughters of the astronomer, before their third
year, name correctly a portrait of Galileo, and one of Struve. A local
"tone," or peculiarity of this sort, attaches to every individual child,
a general one to the children of a race. I may add that the third child
(in England) seems to have been less accurately observed than the others
(in Madison, Wisconsin). Great patience and attention are required to
observe and note down every word used by a child in a month.

Without mentioning the name of Holden, but referring to his
investigations, which, in spite of the defects mentioned, are of the
very highest merit, M. W. Humphreys, Professor of Greek in Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, has published a similar treatise, based on
observations of his own ("A Contribution to Infantile Linguistic," in
the "Transactions of the American Philological Association," 1880, xi,
pp. 6-17). He collected, with the help of a dictionary, all the words
that a little girl of just two years "had full command of," whether
correctly pronounced or not, and whether they appeared exactly in the
twenty-fourth month or earlier. He simply required to be convinced that
every one of the words was understood and had been spontaneously used,
and could still be used. He did not include proper names, or words
(amounting to hundreds) from nursery-rhymes, or numerals, or names of
the days of the week, because he was not sure that the child had a
definite idea associated with them. The vocabulary thus numbered 1,121
words: 592 nouns, 283 verbs, 114 adjectives, 56 adverbs, 35 pronouns, 28
prepositions, 5 conjunctions, and 8 interjections. In this table
irregular verb-and noun-forms are not counted as separate words, except
in the case of defective verbs, as _am_, _was_, _been_. The author
presents the 1,121 words according to their classification as parts of
speech, and according to initial _letters_, not according to initial
_sounds_, although he himself declares this an erroneous proceeding, as
I did in discussing Holden's paper. The only reason for it was
convenience.

In the adoption of a word by the child, difficulty of utterance had some
influence in the _first_ year; when the little girl was two years old,
this had ceased to have any effect whatever. She had by that time
adopted certain substitutes for letters that she could not pronounce,
and words containing these letters were employed by her as freely as