I have appropriated these words of Dr. Joseph Le Conte because the general reader is not likely to see them where they were originally printed, in a little university study, and it is a pity to let the general reader miss so good an introduction to the subject. Not all learned men rate baby biography as highly as Dr. Le Conte does; but probably all biologists do, and those psychologists who are most strongly impressed with the evolutionary interpretation of life. It is easy to see why one’s views of evolution affect the matter. In botany, for instance, we do not think that we can understand the mature plant by studying it alone, without knowledge of its germinating period. If we omitted all study of radicle and plumule and cotyledon, we should not only lose an interesting chapter from the science, but even the part we kept, the classification and morphology and physiology of the grown plant itself, would be seriously misunderstood in some ways. So in other sciences: it is necessary to understand how things came to be what they are, to study the _process of becoming_, so to speak, before the completed result can be understood. This is what we mean by “the genetic method” of studying a subject. Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human mind unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will feel the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in our grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single complete, inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so fused together by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We know that this is the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance at a ball, and see its form with a single act of mind. Yet that act became possible only after long drill in putting simpler perceptions together. Many a test of form, turning objects over and over, passing the hands round and round them, learning the absence of corners, the equality of diameters, did we go through in babyhood, many an inspection by eye, many an exercise of memory, connecting the peculiar arrangement of light and shade with the form as felt, before we could “see” a ball. Had this been understood in Froebel’s time, it would have made a material difference in his suggestions as to sense training in earliest infancy. So other powers that seem simple and inborn may perhaps be detected in the act of forming themselves out of simpler ones, if we watch babies closely enough, and it may lead us to revise some of our theories about education.