All children are known to be late in beginning to speak about themselves, of what they wish to become, or of that which they can do better than others can, and the like. The _ego_ has become an experience of consciousness long before this. All these progressive steps, which in the individual can be traced only with great pains, form, as it were, converging lines that culminate in the fully developed feeling of the personality as exclusive, as distinct from the outer world. Thus much the purely physiological view can admit without hesitation; but a further unification or indivisibility or unbroken permanence of the child's _ego_, it can not reconcile with the facts, perfectly well established by me, that are presented in this chapter. For what is the significance of the fact, that "to the child his feet, hands, teeth, seem a plaything foreign to himself"? and that "the child bit his own arm as he was accustomed to bite objects with which he was not acquainted"? "Seem" to what part of the child? What is that which bites in the child as in the very young chick that seizes its own toe with its bill and bites it as if it were the toe of its neighbor or a grain of millet? Evidently the "subject" in the head is a different one from that in the trunk. The _ego_ of the brain is other than the _ego_ of the spinal marrow (the "spinal-marrow-soul" of Pflueger). The one speaks, sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels; the other merely feels, and at the beginning, so long as brain and spinal marrow have only a loose organic connection and no functional connection at all with each other, the two _egos_ are absolutely isolated from each other. Newly-born children with no brain, who lived for hours and days, as I myself saw in a case of rare interest, could suck, cry, move the limbs, and feel (for they stopped crying and took to sucking when something they could suck was put into their mouths when they were hungry). On the other hand, if a human being could be born with a brain but without a spinal marrow and could live, it would not be able to move its limbs. When a normal babe, therefore, plays with its feet or bites itself in the arm as it would bite a biscuit, we have in this a proof that the brain with its perceptive apparatus is independent of the spinal marrow. And the fact that acephalic new-born human beings and animal embryos deprived of brain, as Soltmann and I found, move their limbs just as sound ones do, cry just as they do, suck and respond to reflexes, proves that the functions of the spinal marrow (inclusive of the optic thalami, the corpora quadrigemina and the cervical marrow) are independent of the cerebral hemispheres (together with the corpus striatum, according to Soltmann).