H. Taine (in the supplement to his book on "Intelligence," which appeared in a German translation in 1880) noted, as expressions used by a French child in the fifteenth month, _papa_, _maman_, _tete_ (nurse, evidently a word taken from the word _teter_, "to nurse or suck at the breast"), _oua-oua_ (dog, in all probability a word said for the child to repeat), _koko_ (cock, no doubt from _coq-coq_, which had been said for the child), _dada_ (horse, carriage, indicating other objects also, no doubt; a demonstrative word, as it is with many German children). _Tem_ was uttered without meaning for two weeks; then it signified "give, take, look, pay attention." I suspect that we have here a mutilation of the strongly accentuated _tiens_, which had probably been often heard. As early as the fourteenth month, _ham_ signified "I want to eat" (_hamm_, then _am_, might have had its origin in the echo of _faim, as-tu faim?_ (are you hungry?)). At the age of three and a half months this child formed only vowels, according to the account; at twelve months she twittered and uttered first _m-m_, then _kraaau_, _papa_, with varying intonation, but spoke no word with a recognizable meaning. In the tenth month there was an understanding of some questions. For the child, when asked "Where is grandpapa?" smiled at the portrait of the grandfather, but not at the one of the grandmother, which was not so good a likeness. In the eleventh month, at the question "Where is mamma?" the child would turn toward her mother, and in like manner toward the father at the question, "papa"? A second child observed by Taine made utterances that had intellectual significance in the seventh week, for the first time. Up to the age of five months _ah_, _gue_, _gre_ (French) were heard; in the seventh month, also _ata_, _ada_. In his reflections, attached to these and a few other observations of his own, Taine rightly emphasizes the great power of generalization and the peculiarity the very young child had of associating with words it had heard other notions than those common with us; but he ascribes too much to the child's inventive genius. The child guesses more than it discovers, and the very cases adduced (_hamm_, _tem_), on which he lays great weight, may be traced, as I remarked above parenthetically, to something heard by the child; this fact he seems to have himself quite overlooked. It is true, that in the acquirement of speech _one_ word may have several different meanings in succession, as is especially the case with the word _bebe_ (corresponding to the English word _baby_), almost universal with French children; it is not true that a child without imitation of sounds invents a word with a fixed meaning, and that, with no help or suggestion from members of the family, it employs its imperfectly uttered syllables (Lallsylben) consistently for designating its ideas.