When a baby has learned to see things clearly, and has known the joys of handling them, it is natural that he should soon come to feel the need of getting to them when they chance to lie beyond arm reach. Apparently the first impulse to move the whole body does always come from this desire to get at something; but I doubt if this remains a very important motive throughout the whole process of learning. There is so much in that process that is instinctive that the baby seems to be in great part taken up and carried on by a current of blind impulse. Then, too, the whole structure of bone, and joint, and muscle is so fitted to certain positions and movements that in the mere chance exercising of his limbs he is steadily brought nearer to the great race acts of balance and locomotion. One might suppose that with babies sprawling, creeping, and toddling on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the beginnings of human locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage that precedes walking is involved in a good deal of confusion. Records are scanty, and children seem to vary a good deal in their way of going at the thing. Most of them “creep before they gang”; but there seems to be a stage before creeping, when, if the child is given full freedom of movement, he will get over the floor in some cruder way, rolling, hitching, dragging himself by the elbows, humping forward measure-worm fashion, or wriggling along like a snake. Perhaps, as I have already suggested, this is because skirts delay the natural beginning of creeping, and these other movements require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there is some deeper reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby makes these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired, and never creeps at all. Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and knees that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping unawares. But soon after she was six months old, she discovered the other half of the trick of rolling--reversing herself from front to rear as well as from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged freedom that it stopped all aspirations in other directions. She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She simply rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt like it or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and asking odds of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction a number of times in succession, she would drift halfway across the room, meeting no end of interesting things by the way--mamma’s slipper tips, chair rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped from the vases, and so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and kept her happy for six or seven weeks.