By the twelfth week the baby had found that her thumb was better for sucking purposes than chance segments of fist, and could turn her hand and get the convenient little projection neatly into her mouth. She got hold of it more by diving her head down to it than by lifting the hand to the mouth. Seizing with the mouth, by motions of the head, like a dog, instead of using the hand to wait on the mouth, seemed still her natural way. But the hands were gaining. In this same twelfth week I saw the little finger tips go fumbling and feeling over our hands and dresses. They, too, had learned active touch, as the tongue had learned it more than a month before. Just at this time we began to bring the baby to the table--nominally so that no one need stay away from meals to look after her; really for the sake of her jovial company at our sober grown-up board, where she would sit, propped amid cushions in her high chair, gazing and smiling sociably at our faces, crowing and flourishing her arms in joy at the lights and the rattle of dishes, forming the sole topic of conversation to an extent that her bachelor uncle had his private and lonely opinion about. The high chair was one of those that have a wooden tray fastened across the front, and here were placed several handy objects--rattle, and ring, and string of spools. This was by the wisdom of grandma, who saw the approach of the power of grasping. One may often see the little hands fluttering empty, the little brain restless, craving its natural development (for grasping is much more a matter of brain development, through the forming of associations, than of hand development), when there is no wise grandma to see that rattle and ring and spools lie “handy by” a little _before_ the baby is ready to use them. To wait till he knows how to grasp before giving him things to practice on is like keeping a boy out of the water till he knows how to swim. Such impeding of the natural activities is responsible for a good deal of the fretting of babies. It was not three days till I saw the little hands go fumbling across the tray, seeking the objects they had become used to finding there; and when they touched rattle or spool, they laid hold on it. Nor was this the old mechanical clasping: it was voluntary action, and as clumsy as new voluntary action is apt to be, compared to involuntary. The baby did not know how to turn her hand and take up a thing neatly: if she touched it in such fashion that she could shut down her fingers on it somehow or anyhow, she would manage to lift it--stuck between two fingers from behind, once, when the back of her hand had touched it; if not, she would go on fumbling till she did. In two or three days more she was laying hold on things and carrying them to her mouth with plain intention.