Professor Preyer complains of teaching babies mere tricks, which have no real relation to their development; and certainly it is a sound rule that self-unfolding, not teaching, is the way in which a baby should develop in the earliest years. But Preyer’s baby learned to wave his hand, and play “patacake,” and show “How big is baby?” and the rest of it, just as other babies do; mammas and nurses cannot resist it. And as long as the babies like it, I do not see that it can do any harm, if it is not overdone. Besides, it may be said that these standard tricks are all closely related to the sign language, and so fall in well with the natural development at this stage. And again, the extreme teachability of the human child is his great superiority over the brute--all our civilization rests on it; and when the time comes that he is capable of receiving training, it may be as well that his power of doing so should be used a little, and that these simple gesture tricks of immemorial nursery tradition are good exercises to begin with. It is possible to make a fetich of “self-development,” beyond all common sense. At all events, as our baby approached seven months old, her mamma had begun to teach her to wave by-by. For a couple of weeks, the mother would hold up the little hand and wave it at the departing guest, and before long the baby would give a feeble waggle or two after her mother had let go; next, she would need only to be started; and a week after she was seven months old she waved a spontaneous farewell as I left the room. There was a long history of the gesture after that, for it was lost and regained, confused with other hand tricks and straightened out, and altogether played a considerable part in the story of sign language and of memory, which I shall not have time to relate. But at all times it paid for itself in the delight it gave the baby: it reconciled her to almost any parting, and even to going to bed. Her objection to going to bed, which had been evident since the fifth month, was because she thought sleeping was a waste of good playtime, not because she had any associations of fear and repugnance connected with it. She had never been left to cry herself to sleep alone, but was rocked and sung to in good old fashion. But she did show signs at this time of timidity and distress in waking from sleep, clinging piteously to her mother and crying. She had waked and cried alone a number of times, and, as I have already said, she seemed to have formed some associations of fear in this way. But I think there were deeper reasons for the confused distress on waking, which from now until halfway through the third year appeared at times.