Few people seem to realize how much a child has to learn before it gets to the A B C. It begins life with very little beyond a capacity for learning, and even its sense organs tell it little until it has had practice in using them. If baby is so unfortunate as to get a scratch from a pin, he wriggles, and makes the whole house aware of it; but he does not seem to have a clear idea at all as to where he is hurt. He has to learn the way about his own body. He passes his hand over his face, and learns that he has features with a definite position and magnitude; he then waves his arms in the air, and learns that there is such a thing as empty space; finally, he knocks his knuckles against the edge of his cradle, and learns that there are other things in existence besides himself. Of course, his eyes help him considerably to form his ideas of things, but his eyes tell him nothing until he has learnt how far to believe them by correcting their impressions by touch. He learns the properties of matter by experiment, not intuition. Very interesting experiments have been made upon people who have been born blind, and to whom sight has been given late in life by an operation. They generally take some time to appreciate their good fortune. Things, they say, are all pressed up against their eyes, and they are afraid to move. Objects with which they have carefully been made familiar before the operation—wooden spheres, cubes, cones and prisms—they have been absolutely unable to recognise by sight until they have handled them. They have mistaken sparrows for tea-cups, and it is sometimes only after weeks that they have suddenly discovered that pictures are something more than a mixture of irregular splashes of colour on a flat surface. Babies have to learn to interpret what they see in much the same way, and take longer about it. The child who cries for the moon is probably not so unreasonable as people think. He focuses his eyes upon the little, bright, sharply-defined disc, and it appears to him, if not actually within arm’s length, at any rate near enough to be caught with a butterfly-net. It is only after he has seen it sink behind a large tree on the distant horizon that he gathers a vague idea of its real size and remoteness.