In the last days of the month came two notable evidences of growing will. One was the baby’s persistent effort to get the tip of her rattle (it was set on a slender ivory shaft) into her mouth. Sometimes it went in by chance; sometimes it hit her lip, and in that case she would stretch her mouth to take it in, moving her head rather than the rattle. But if it brought up against her cheek, too far away to be captured by such efforts, after trying a little, she would lower the rattle, and make a fresh start for better luck. This may seem highly unintelligent action; yet after all, as Professor Morgan says, it is by the method of “trial and error” that most of our acts of skill (and perhaps all such acts of the lower animals) are learned. In trial after trial the baby associated the muscular feeling of the successful movement with the feeling of the rattle tip in her mouth, and repeated these movements more and more correctly, dropping the unsuccessful ones. In just this way the sharpshooter, through repeated trials and misses, learns to deflect his rifle barrel this way and that with an infinite fineness of muscular contractions, which he could never get by reasoning on it. The other effort of will was in sitting up. During the whole month the baby had insisted on a sitting position, and had wailed as vigorously over being left flat on her back as over being left hungry. She had soon tried to take the matter into her own hands, and made many efforts to lift herself, sometimes by pulling on our fingers when we had laid them in her hands, sometimes by sheer strain of the abdominal muscles. She never succeeded in raising more than her head and shoulders till the last week of the month: then she did once lift herself, and in the following days tried with the utmost zeal to repeat the success. She would strive and strain, with a grave and earnest face, her whole baby soul evidently centred on the achievement. She would tug at our fingers till her little face was crimson; she would lift her head and shoulders and strain to rise higher, fall back and try it again, till she was tired out. The day she was three months old, she tried twenty-five times, with scarcely a pause, and even then, though she was beginning to fret pitifully with disappointment, she did not stop of her own accord. Unless she began with a somewhat high reclining position, or her feet or hips were held, her little legs would fly up, and she could not get the leverage to lift her body. For that matter, even with us the legs are lighter than the trunk, and few women can overcome the difference, and lift themselves by sheer strength of the abdominal muscles, without having the feet held: and a baby’s legs are so much lighter than ours that it must be for several years a sheer impossibility for him to do it.