Of all a baby’s doings this toe business is the one that people find it most impossible to regard with scientific seriousness. But its indirect usefulness is considerable. The coöperation of different parts of the body that it teaches is remarkable; and it must have great influence in extending the sense of self to the legs and feet, where it has hitherto seemed but weakly developed. This is important in getting the body ready for standing and walking. The baby now showed intelligence in her actions in several little ways, such as tugging with impatient cries at her mother’s dress when she wanted her dinner, and leaning over to pluck at the carriage blanket, under which her mother had laid some flowers to keep them from her. She slipped a long-handled spoon farther down in her hand to get the end of the handle into her mouth (almost exactly the same act as the one that Darwin thought first showed “a sort of practical reflection” in his child at about the same age: the boy slipped his hand down his father’s finger, in order to get the finger tip into his mouth). In the second week of the month she began to watch things as they fell, and then to throw them down purposely, to watch them falling. I have already mentioned certain doubtful imitations in the fourth month, and a clearer one in the fifth. Now the baby began to imitate unmistakably. Her uncle had a fashion of slapping his hand down on the table by way of a salutation to her, and one day (when she had passed a week of her sixth month) she slapped down her little hand in return. The next day as soon as her uncle came in, she began to slap her hand down, watching him, delighted to repeat the movement back and forth, as long as he would keep it up. She would imitate me also when I did it; and in the course of the month several other little imitations occurred. I have already spoken of the great importance psychologists attach to imitation. Professor Baldwin makes it the great principle of development in child and race--all evolution one long history of its workings; but he uses the word in a far wider sense than the ordinary one, tracing “imitation” from the mechanical repetition of life-preserving motions by the lowest living things, up to the spiritual effort of men and women to live up to their own highest ideals. Even using the word in its ordinary sense, we know what a potent force in the little one’s education imitation is. The age, however, at which it is most efficient is considerably later than the sixth month, and it did not count for much yet with our baby.