with the greatest interest, calling them balls, and wanting everybody to feel them. The nose, too, is repeatedly investigated. Although it is seldom large enough to be grasped, still, as Stanley Hall says, it is handled with unmistakable signs of curiosity, and often pulled or rubbed “in an investigating way.”[15] The value of the sense of touch for the earliest mental development is testified to by the fact that the child, like doubting Thomas, trusts more to it than to his sight. Sikorski says: “At tea I turn to my eleven-months baby, point to the cracker jar, which she knows, and ask her to give me one. I open the empty jar and the child looks in, but, not satisfied with that, sticks her hand in and explores. The evidence of her eyes does not convince her of the absence of what she wants.”[16] In Wolfdietrich one verse runs: “Die Augen in ihren (der Wölfe) Häuptern, die brannten wie ein Licht, Der Knabe war noch thöricht und zagt vor Feinden nicht. Es ging zu einem jeden und griff ihm mit der Hand, Wo er die lichten Augen in ihren Köpfen fand.”[17] Older children lose the habit of playful investigation quite as little as any of the other manifestations of experimentation, even when the sensations encountered are not particularly agreeable. Richard Wagner liked to handle satin, and Sacher Masoch delighted in soft fur. In later life as well, Perez continues, all the senses strive for satisfaction; when the adult is not forced by necessity to put all his faculties at the service of “attention utile” he becomes a child again. He easily falls back into the habit of gazing instead of looking, of listening instead of hearing, of handling instead of touching, of moving about merely for the sake of sensations agreeable or even indifferent which are produced by these automatic acts.[18] We all know how hard it is for school children to keep their hands still during recitation. “I knew a little girl,” says Compayré, “who would undertake to recite only on condition that she be allowed to use her fingers at the same time, and she would sew and thread her needle while she was spelling.”[19] The knitting of women while they listen is perhaps of the same nature. Wölfflin remarks: “We all know that many people, especially students, in order to think clearly need a sharp-pointed pencil, which they pass back and forth through the fingers, sharpening their wits by the sensation of contact.”[20] Then, too, there are the innumerable toying movements of adults, such as rolling bread crumbs and the like, all of which serves to introduce a short ethnological digression. “In the year 1881,” relates the brilliant W. Joest, “when I was travelling through Siberia, ... I noticed that many of the men, requiring some occupation for their nervous hands during leisure hours, played absently with walnuts, which had become highly polished from constant use.” He saw stones, brass and iron balls, and the Turkish