of nervous energy which makes the neck muscles contract, just as it makes other muscles contract.  The first slight raisings of the head are like the first kicking movements, merely impulsive; but the child soon sees the advantage of this apparently accidental movement and tries to master it.  Preyer[A] considers that the efforts to balance the head among the first indications that the child’s will is taking possession of his muscles.  His own boy arrived at this point when he was between three and four months old.

[Sidenote:  Reflex Grasping]

The grasp of the new-born baby’s hand has a surprising power, but the baby himself has little to do with it.  The muscles act because of a stimulus presented by the touch of the fingers, very much as the muscles of a decapitated frog contract when the current of electricity passes over them.  This is called reflex grasping, and Dr. Louis Robinson,[B] thinking that this early strength of gasp was an important illustration of and evidence for evolution, tried experiments on some sixty new-born babies.  He found that they could sustain their whole weight by the arms alone when their hands were clasped about a slender rod.  They grasped the rod at once and could be lifted from the bed by it and kept in this position about half a minute.  He argued that this early strength of arm, which soon begins to disappear, was survival from the remote period when the baby’s ancestors were monkeys or monkey-like people who lived in trees.

[Sidenote:  Beginnings Of Will Power]

However this may be, during the first week the baby’s hands are much about his face.  By accident they reach, the mouth, they are sucked; the child feels himself suck its own fist; he feels his fist being sucked.  Some day it will occur to him that that fist belongs to the same being who owns the sucking mouth.  But at this point, Miss Shinn[C] has observed, the baby is often surprised and indignant that he cannot move his arms around and at the same time suck his fist.  This discomfort helps him to make an effort to get his fist into his mouth and keep it there, and this effort shows his will, beginning to take possession of his hands and arms.

[Sidenote:  Growth of Will]

Since any faculty grows by its own exercise, just as muscles grow by exercise, every time the baby succeeds in getting his hands to his mouth as a result of desire, every time that he succeeds in grasping an object as result of desire, his will power grows.  Action of this nature brings in new sensations, and the brain centers used for recording such sensations grow.

As the sensations multiply, he compares them, and an idea is born.  For the beginnings of mental development no other mechanism is actually needed than a brain and a hand and the nerves connecting them.  Laura Bridgeman and Helen Keller, both of them deaf and blind, received their education almost entirely through their hands, and yet they were unusually capable of thinking.  The child’s hands, then, from the beginning, are the servants of his brain-instruments by means of which he carries impressions from the outer world to the seat of consciousness, and by which in turn he imprints his consciousness upon the outer world.