The child’s first voice practice consists in screaming. So far as it is a merely reflex expression of discomfort it does not concern us, but it is probable that the crying of children becomes practice for the organs of speech. Discomfort may still be its first occasion, but the continuation of the cry is playful. “L’enfant qui crie,” says Compayré, “a souvent plaiser à crier.”[64] Children of two and three years show this very plainly; the howl begun in earnest is often prolonged from playful experimentation.[65] And the same is probably true of the customary moaning wail of women over their dead. O. Ludwig says somewhere that a woman subdues pain when she can not escape it by means of the sensuous relief which she finds in noisy moaning. More important than crying are the babbling, chattering, and gurgling of infants, which begin about the middle of the first three months. This instinctive tendency to motor discharge produces movements of the larynx, mouth, and tongue muscles, and the child that attains now to the voluntary production of tone is fairly launched in experimentation. Without this playful practice he could not become master of his voice, and the imperative impulse to imitation which is developed later would lack its most essential foundation. From among the numerous reports of the first efforts of infants in the direction of speech we will select Preyer’s very satisfactory observations: “At first, when the lall-monologue begins the mouth assumes an almost infinite variety of forms. The lips, the tongue, lower jaw, and larynx are all active, and more variously so than in later life; at the same time the breath is expelled loudly, so that now one, now another sound is accidentally produced. The child hears these new sounds, hears his own voice, and delights in making a noise as he enjoys moving his limbs in the bath.[66]... On the forty-third day I heard the first consonants. The child, being comfortably seated, gave utterance to numerous incoherent sounds, but at last said clearly _am-ma_. Of the vowels, only _a_ and _o_ could be distinguished then, but on the following day the baby astonished us by pronouncing the syllables _ta-hu_ with perfect clearness. On the forty-sixth day I heard _gö_, _örö_, and five days later _ara_. On the sixty-fifth day _a-omb_ sounded in his babbling, and on the seventy-first, at a time when he was most contented, the combination _ra-a-ao_. On the seventy-eighth day, with unmistakable signs of satisfaction, _habu_ was pronounced. At five months he said _ögö_, _ma-ö-ĕ_, _hӑ_, _ŏ_, _ho_, _ich_. The rare _i_ (English _e_) was clearer here than in the third month, and at about this time began the loud crowing as an expression of delight. The unusually loud breathing and the clearly voiced _h_ in connection with the labial _r_ in _brrr-hà_, are specially indicative of pleasure, as are also the _aja_, _örrgö ā-ā-i ŏā_ sounds which, toward the end of