Holden now determined in the most careful manner the words actually used by two children during the twenty-fourth month of their lives. A friend in England ascertained the same for a third child. All doubtful words were rigidly excluded. For example, words from nursery rhymes were excluded, unless they were independently and separately used in the same way with words of daily and common use. In the first two cases the words so excluded are above 500 in number. Again, the names of objects represented in pictures were not included unless they were often spontaneously used by the children. The lists of words are presented in the order of their initial letters, because the ease or difficulty of pronouncing a word, the author is convinced, largely determines its early or late adoption. In this I can not fully agree with him, on the ground of my own experience (particularly since I have myself been teaching my child English, in his fourth year; he learns the language easily). It is not correct that the pronunciation rather than the meaning makes the learning of a word difficult. Thus, in all three of Holden's cases, the words that have the least easy initial (s) predominate; the child, however, avoided them and substituted easy ones. Holden makes no mention of this; and in his list of all the words used he puts together, strangely, under one and the same letter, without regard to their sound-(phonic) value, vocables that begin with entirely different sounds. Thus, e. g., under _c_ are found _corner_ (_k_), _chair_ (tsch), _cellar_ (_s_); under _k_, actually _knee_ (_n_) and _keep_ (_k_), and, under _s_, words that begin with the same _s_-sound as in _cellar_, e. g., _soap_, and also words beginning with the _sch_-sound, _sugar_, and with _st_, _sw_, _sm_, and many others. As the words of the three children are grouped, not according to the _sounds_ with which they begin, but according to their initial _letters_, into twenty-six classes, the author's conclusions can not be admitted. The words must first all be arranged according to their initial _sounds_. When this task is accomplished, which brings _no_ and _know_, e. g., into one class, _wrap_ and _rag_ into a second--whereas they were put in four different classes--then we find by no means the same order of succession that Holden gives. The author wrote to me, however, in 1882, that his oldest child _understood_ at least 1,000 words more than those enumerated here, i. e., than those published by him, and that with both children facility of pronunciation had more influence in regard to the use of words than did the ease with which the words could be understood; this, however, does not plainly follow from the printed statements before me, as he admits. When the first-born child was captivated by a new word, she was accustomed to practice it by herself, alone, and then to come and employ it with a certain pride. The second child did so, too, only in a less striking manner.