the educator to discover the measure of intelligence in a child, just as it is essential to know the causes of his backwardness...

The child is extremely sensitive, and so is affected by the smallest things; likewise, understanding him in childhood is quite essen-tial, and brings him happiness later on.

Nor is the idea of testing at all new. Thirty years ago the psy-chologist “Arnold Gesell,” at Yale University, carried out a number of tests which became a yardstick for the child's progress through several stages... and many others besides have worked in the same field... Today new tests are being made, based on the observation and study of a great number of children... In this way it becomes possible to fix the age for walk-ing, talking, sitting, standing,

jumping, and climbing; and the observer marvels at the speed and ease with which children learn... The first thing the little one learns is speech: the affection with which his parents and the members of the family surround him in a natural home helps him to utter his first sound...

The language he will later master has comical and charming beginnings... It may lack polish and firmness: he drops a letter here and a word there without noticing... This is called the “pre-speech” period. In the sixth month the child begins to murmur sounds that he alone understands, and he may pronounce an intelligible word in the tenth month... Hardly does he reach his first year before he possesses a stock of words and phrases more or less intelligible...

In his second year he tries with all his might to express the ideas crowded into his head — and this is what makes little ones at this age restless and nervous, satisfied with nothing whatever... Parents lose all patience with the little one in this particular period, and to them the psychologist says: Imagine yourselves in a strange country, not knowing a letter of its people's language — such, exactly, is the child's con-dition... At that point he needs someone who will understand him, be tender with him, and care for him — not someone who mocks him and his speech... Nor should it be forgotten that this is the most delightful of the stages of growth... and educators can make of it a pleasure from which they and the little one alike may profit...