Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this: the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse to _pull up_, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up; the slow and doubtful development of creeping, as if the ancestral creature had been almost purely a tree-dweller, with no period of free running on all-fours. Tree-dwelling creatures, living on the dainties of the forest, fruit and nuts and eggs and birds, are better nourished than the ground-roaming tribes; but that is not half the story. The tree mothers cannot tuck their babies away in a lair and leave them; the tree babies cannot begin early to scramble about, like little cubs--their dwelling is too unsafe. There is nothing for it but the mother’s arms; the baby must be held, and carried, and protected longer than the earth babies. That was the handicap of the tree life, our ancestors might have thought--the helpless babies. But, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, it was that long, helpless babyhood that gave the brain its chance to grow and made us human. At eleven months old our little girl could stand alone as long as she cared to, though perhaps it was not till the next month that she felt altogether secure on her feet. She could climb up and down stairs with perfect ease. She could walk held by one hand, but she did not care to, and creeping was still her main means of getting anywhere. Her understanding of speech had grown wonderfully, and as she was docile in obeying directions, I could always find out whether she knew a thing by name by saying, “Point to the rose,” or “Bring the book to aunty,” and thus found it possible to make out a trustworthy list of the words she knew: fifty-one names of people and things; twenty-eight action words, which she proved she understood by obeying (“give” and “sit down,” and the like), and a few adverbial expressions, like “where” and “all gone”--eighty-four words in all, securely associated with ideas. She understood them in simple combinations, too, such as, “Bring mamma Ruth’s shoes;” and often, where she did not know all the words in a sentence, she could guess quite shrewdly from those she did, interpreting our movements vigilantly.