ABSTRACT
During the first fortnight he often started on hearing any sudden sound, and blinked his eyes. […] The noise of crying […] is of course uttered in an instinctive manner, but serves to show that there is suffering. After a time the sound differs according to the cause, such as hunger or pain. […] When 46 days old, he first made little noises without any meaning to please himself and these soon became varied. When five and a half months old, he uttered an articulate sound “da” but without any meaning attached to it. When a little over a year old, he used gestures to explain his wishes. […] At exactly the age of a year, he made the great step of inventing a word for food, namely, mum, but what led him to it I did not discover. […] Before he was a year old, he understood intonations and gestures, as well as several words and short sentences. He understood one word, namely, his nurse’s name, exactly five months before he invented his first word mum; and this is what might have been expected, as we know that the lower animals easily learn to understand spoken words.
