or hurting themselves.  When they began to walk they were enticed to come to the breast.  The little negroes are often in a position much more difficult for sucking.  They cling to the mother’s hip, and cling so tightly that the mother’s arm is often not needed to support them.  They clasp the breast with their hand and continue sucking while their mother goes on with her ordinary work.  These children begin to walk at two months, or rather to crawl.  Later on they can run on all fours almost as well as on their feet.—­Buffon.  M. Buffon might also have quoted the example of England, where the senseless and barbarous swaddling clothes have become almost obsolete.  Cf.  La Longue Voyage de Siam, Le Beau Voyage de Canada, etc.]

You must expect great opposition from the nurses, who find a half strangled baby needs much less watching.  Besides his dirtyness is more perceptible in an open garment; he must be attended to more frequently.  Indeed, custom is an unanswerable argument in some lands and among all classes of people.

Do not argue with the nurses; give your orders, see them carried out, and spare no pains to make the attention you prescribe easy in practice.  Why not take your share in it?  With ordinary nurslings, where the body alone is thought of, nothing matters so long as the child lives and does not actually die, but with us, when education begins with life, the new-born child is already a disciple, not of his tutor, but of nature.  The tutor merely studies under this master, and sees that his orders are not evaded.  He watches over the infant, he observes it, he looks for the first feeble glimmering of intelligence, as the Moslem looks for the moment of the moon’s rising in her first quarter.

We are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving nothing.  The mind, bound up within imperfect and half grown organs, is not even aware of its own existence.  The movements and cries of the new-born child are purely reflex, without knowledge or will.

Suppose a child born with the size and strength of manhood, entering upon life full grown like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter; such a child-man would be a perfect idiot, an automaton, a statue without motion and almost without feeling; he would see and hear nothing, he would recognise no one, he could not turn his eyes towards what he wanted to see; not only would he perceive no external object, he would not even be aware of sensation through the several sense-organs.  His eye would not perceive colour, his ear sounds, his body would be unaware of contact with neighbouring bodies, he would not even know he had a body, what his hands handled would be in his brain alone; all his sensations would be united in one place, they would exist only in the common “sensorium,” he would have only one idea, that of self, to which he would refer all his sensations; and this idea, or rather this feeling, would be the only thing in which he excelled an ordinary child.