elve years old, but as
fully formed in figure as a girl of eighteen, and taller than I was.
Then, the idea struck me of developing her greediness, and by these
means to try and produce some slight powers of distinguishing into her
mind, and to force her, by the diversity of flavors, if not to reason,
at any rate to arrive at instinctive distinctions, which would of
themselves constitute a species of work that was material to thought.
Later on, by appealing to her passions, and by carefully making use of
those which could serve us, we might hope to obtain a kind of reaction
on her intellect, and by degrees increase the insensible action of her
brain.

"One day I put two plates before her, one of soup, and the other of very
sweet vanilla cream. I made her taste each of them successively, and
then I let her choose for herself, and she ate the plate of cream. In a
short time I made her very greedy, so greedy that it appeared as if the
only idea she had in her head was the desire for eating. She perfectly
recognized the various dishes, and stretched out her hands towards those
that she liked, and took hold of them eagerly, and she used to cry when
they were taken from her. Then I thought I would try and teach her to
come to the dining room when the dinner bell rang. It took a long time,
but I succeeded in the end. In her vacant intellect, there was a fixed
correlation between the sound and her taste, a correspondence between
two senses, an appeal from one to the other, and consequently a sort of
connection of ideas--if one can call that kind of instinctive hyphen
between two organic functions an idea--and so I carried my experiments
further, and taught her, with much difficulty, to recognize meal times
on the face of the clock.

"It was impossible for me for a long time to attract her attention to
the hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the
striking apparatus. The means I employed were very simple; I asked them
not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into
the dining room, when the little brass hammer struck twelve o'clock, but
I found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes. She
ran to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she
learned that all the strokes had not the same value as far as regarded
meals, and she frequently fixed her eyes, guided by her ears, on the
dial of the clock.

"When I noticed that, I took care, every day