The Mind of the Child, Part II: The Development of the Intellect, International Education; Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX.Preyer, William T.
Science
The Mind of the Child, Part II: The Development of the Intellect, International Education; Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX.
Preyer, William T.
Child development; Child psychology
"On the third day she observed the doors on the opposite side of
the street and asked if they were red, but they were, in fact,
of an oak-color. In the evening she looked at her brother's face
and said that she saw his nose. He asked her to touch it, which
she did. He then slipped a handkerchief over his face and asked
her to look again, when she playfully pulled it off and asked,
'What is that?'
"On the sixth day she told us that she saw better than she had
done on any preceding day; 'but I can not tell what I do see. I
am quite stupid.' She felt disappointed in not having the power
of distinguishing at once by her eye objects which she could so
readily distinguish from one another by feeling them.
"On the seventh day she observed that the mistress of the house
was tall. She asked what the color of her gown was, to which she
was answered that it was blue. 'So is that thing on your head,'
she then observed, which was the case; 'and your handkerchief,
that is a different color,' which was also correct. She added,
'I see you pretty well, I think.' The teacups and saucers
underwent an examination. 'What are they like?' her brother
asked her. 'I don't know,' she replied, 'they look very queer to
me, but I can tell what they are in a minute when I touch them.'
She distinguished an orange, but could form no notion of what it
was till she touched it. She seemed now to have become more
cheerful, and she was very sanguine that she would find her
newly acquired faculty of more use to her when she returned
home, where everything was familiar to her.
"On the eighth day she asked her brother 'what he was helping
himself to?' and when she was told it was a glass of port wine,
she replied, 'Port wine is dark, and looks to me very ugly.' She
observed, when candles were brought into the room, her brother's
face in the mirror as well as that of a lady who was present;
she also walked for the first time without assistance from her
chair to a sofa which was on the opposite side of the room and
back again to the chair. When at tea she took notice of the
tray, observed the shining of the japan-work, and asked 'what
the color was round the edge?' she was told that it was yellow,
upon which she remarked, 'I will know that again.'
"On the ninth day she came down-stairs to breakfast in great
spirits. She said to her brother, 'I see you very well to-day,'
and came up to him and shook hands. She also observed a ticket
on a window of a house on the opposite side of the street ('a
lodging to let'), and her brother, to convince himself of her
seeing it, took her to the window three separate times, and to
his surprise and gratification she pointed it out to him
distinctly on each trial.
"She spent a great part of the eleventh day looking out of the
window, and spoke very little.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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