Professor Preyer and most other observers have tried to account for this persistent drift of everything to the baby’s mouth by the theory of taste association: the baby’s most agreeable experience has been that of tasting milk, and so he connects all pleasure with the idea of getting things to his mouth. This seems to me quite untenable. An association between taste and the feeling of something in the mouth would not be formed unless the two occurred together quite regularly; and what with the washing out of a baby’s mouth each time he is nursed, and the frequent stumbling in of his hands, and later the deliberate sucking of fists, he finds tasteless objects there oftener than milk. Again, it is not the movement of the hands up to the mouth that would become associated with food, but rather the feeling of being laid at the breast (which our baby did in fact associate early with food, as I have related). And in the third place, there is not the least evidence that taste is the most agreeable experience of young babies; on the contrary, the tests go to show that they have a low taste sensibility. The craving of hunger, of course, is an intense feeling in babies, and its satisfaction (rather than taste pleasure) is greatly enjoyed; but except just at the hungry moment, they pay far more attention to looking, and hearing, and feeling than to eating. Our baby, after the first edge of hunger was off, was always ready to desert the breast to look at something interesting. She would nurse a little, then throw herself back on her mother’s arm to smile up into her face. She cried quite as hard over being obliged to lie down, where she could not look around her, as over being hungry; and getting her meal caused no such marked signs of pleasure as light and motion, the bath, and the free use of her own powers. Some babies are hungrier than ours was, and some are like her; but I think close observation would show all alike more taken up with their higher powers than with food. And as all alike put everything into their mouths when they first learn to grasp, we must find some other reason for the act than food association.