We can do nothing simply, not even for our children.  Toys of silver, gold, coral, cut crystal, rattles of every price and kind; what vain and useless appliances.  Away with them all!  Let us have no corals or rattles; a small branch of a tree with its leaves and fruit, a stick of liquorice which he may suck and chew, will amuse him as well as these splendid trifles, and they will have this advantage at least, he will not be brought up to luxury from his birth.

It is admitted that pap is not a very wholesome food.  Boiled milk and uncooked flour cause gravel and do not suit the stomach.  In pap the flour is less thoroughly cooked than in bread and it has not fermented.  I think bread and milk or rice-cream are better.  If you will have pap, the flour should be lightly cooked beforehand.  In my own country they make a very pleasant and wholesome soup from flour thus heated.  Meat-broth or soup is not a very suitable food and should be used as little as possible.  The child must first get used to chewing his food; this is the right way to bring the teeth through, and when the child begins to swallow, the saliva mixed with the food helps digestion.

I would have them first chew dried fruit or crusts.  I should give them as playthings little bits of dry bread or biscuits, like the Piedmont bread, known in the country as “grisses.”  By dint of softening this bread in the mouth some of it is eventually swallowed the teeth come through of themselves, and the child is weaned almost imperceptibly.  Peasants have usually very good digestions, and they are weaned with no more ado.

From the very first children hear spoken language; we speak to them before they can understand or even imitate spoken sounds.  The vocal organs are still stiff, and only gradually lend themselves to the reproduction of the sounds heard; it is even doubtful whether these sounds are heard distinctly as we hear them.  The nurse may amuse the child with songs and with very merry and varied intonation, but I object to her bewildering the child with a multitude of vain words of which it understands nothing but her tone of voice.  I would have the first words he hears few in number, distinctly and often repeated, while the words themselves should be related to things which can first be shown to the child.  That fatal facility in the use of words we do not understand begins earlier than we think.  In the schoolroom the scholar listens to the verbiage of his master as he listened in the cradle to the babble of his nurse.  I think it would be a very useful education to leave him in ignorance of both.

All sorts of ideas crowd in upon us when we try to consider the development of speech and the child’s first words.  Whatever we do they all learn to talk in the same way, and all philosophical speculations are utterly useless.