During these weeks a note of real desire, unheard before, appeared in her voice. Her face had at times, when she saw something new, or when she gazed at us while we talked to her, an expression of inquiry and effort to comprehend, with lips drawn in and brow tense. No one could watch her and not see the beginnings of some sort of mental life. VIII THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS She sprang into this era suddenly, within four days. It was not infrequently thus, and perhaps more and more as the little brain grew complex. Some power that had been slowly developing would leap up into completion, unlocking a dozen other doors of mental life. To put it physiologically, some one new connection established between brain cells would bring a whole network of others into coöperation--the more easily as ancestral nerve paths seemed often to open up at a touch. When the baby had passed ten days of her fifth month, she was still grasping half mechanically. On the eleventh day, lying on her back, she held her rattle above her and looked at it carefully. Her attention had turned to the things that she grasped. She had come before to the perception of a world of objects, but apparently only now to the realization of it. And thereupon, that very day, I saw that she was no longer using eyes and hands merely as means of getting mouth sensations; she was holding objects, looking at them, and pulling them about, for some moments, before they went to her mouth. The pleasure of this handling seemed to be in the free movement of the objects (seen and felt at the same time), not especially in the touch sensations. When this new pleasure was exhausted, things went to the mouth as before for the enjoyment of touch. It was long before the fingers rivaled the lips in pure æsthetic touch enjoyment; perhaps they never do, else the dandy would finger his cane knob, instead of mouthing it, girls would smooth rose-leaves across their finger tips, not their lips, and a kiss would have no higher rank than a hand-clasp. But for grasping purposes the supremacy now passed promptly over to the hands, and from this week the habit of grasping with the mouth by head movements declined and disappeared. In a few hours the baby was reaching for everything near her, and in three days more her desire to lay hold on things was the dominant motive of her life. Her grasping was still oftener with both hands than one, and was somewhat slow, but always accurate. Some babies learn to grasp more suddenly than she did, and often miss their aim; but with her cautious method of bringing down her hands toward an object from either side, penning it in between, she could hardly make errors. The thing once corralled, she would pull it around, perhaps a minute, then put it to her mouth.