A question uttered or unexpressed is a prayer for knowledge. The moment when it arises in the soul should be sacred, almost like that of the hour of visitation of the Holy Ghost to the religious teacher. Not to feed every normal curiosity the good teacher will consider recreancy to his duty.

Many questions, no doubt, arise in the average mind but once in an entire lifetime, and if the opportunity which they make is not promptly and effectively utilized, the bud of promise is forever blasted. Perhaps, in the future, education will realize the idea of being guided solely by these chief expressions of psychic need or want. For most of us there comes for a time, most commonly in very early adolescence, an allsided, disinterested curiosity, which is the basis of liberal education, but which vanishes later and is succeeded by a second growth of interests, which are more and more tinged with utility, professional success, or individual advancement. When such studies as these shall be carried more fully into the later teens, this change from what we may call pure curiosity to that with an alloy of gain or advancement in it will be more clearly seen. Indeed, few people in any community illustrate up to full maturity what man as man most centrally wants to know. One great purpose of education is to so place and to so environ a few individuals that they shall thus illustrate the deeper tendencies of race advancement, so that their interests shall point as truly as the needle to the goal of human destiny. This, we grant, is a very difficult problem, only partially attainable. Even the child's theological interests, as here illustrated, are more or less factitious, and are very different in unknown and non-Christian lands and ages, and due to precocious doctrinal inculcation. They thus rest on a very different foundation, and have a very different culture value from the purely spontaneous interests in the varying phenomena and

objects of nature, or even from that in things hidden, or in the mechanical secrets of toys, etc.

In summarizing the results of this study it appears that curiosity develops by gradual stages and is a fundamental factor in the development of attention.

Four stages of development may be recognized:

1. Passive staring, considered as a reflex with psychic accompaniment; manifested in infants as early as the second week of life.

2. Surprise, usually noted in the second month.

3. Wonder, which is observable about the end of the second month, the time when the accommodation of eye takes place.

4. Interrogation or curiosity proper, which begins to be manifested about the fifth month.

These last three stages are those recognized by Ribot. The chief stimuli of curiosity during the first half year are those of sight. The order in which interest in other sensations develop is hearing, touch and muscle sensations, smell, and taste. These do not successively predominate but overlap, and sight, the first in order, is not subordinated as other interests develop.

Curiosity is manifested by (1) observation, passive and active; (2) experiments; (3) questions; (4) destructiveness; (5) desire to travel.

Aimless curiosity or inquisitiveness is, in normal children, usually a sign of fatigue, and this is also true of echolalia. When chronic, both these manifestations indicate neurotic tendencies associated with defective power of attention and lack of inhibitory control.

Curiosity is the active factor in the development of attention, and lack of it shows either mental deficiency or bad pedagogy.

Animals show the various stages in the development of curiosity, and manifest it by observation (as do human beings), experiment, and destructiveness, though it is probable that, except in the higher animals, the full stage of interrogation is never reached. THEODATE L. SMITH

G. STANLEY HALL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Compayré, Gabriel. Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child (translated by Mary E. Wilson). D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1896. Darwin, Charles. Biographical Sketch of an Infant Mind,” Mind, Vol. II, pp. 285–294, July, 1877.

Darwin, Charles. Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1873. 374 pages.

Darwin, Charles. Descent of Man (2d edition). D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1903. 688 pages.

Groos, Karl. The Play of Animals (translated by Elizabeth L. Baldwin). D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1898. 341 pages.

Hall, Mrs. Winfield S. "The First Five Hundred Days of a Child's Life," Child Study Monthly, Vol. II, pp. 330–342, 394-407, 458-473, 522-537, 586-608, 1896–1897.

Hogan, Louise E. A Study of a Child. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1898. 219 pages.

James, William. Principles of Psychology, pp. 383-441. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1890.

Keller, Helen A. The Story of My Life, pp. 22, 23. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1904. 441 pages.

Moore, Mrs. Kathleen C. Mental Development of a Child, New York, 1896 (150 pages); also Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, Vol. I, No. 3, 1896 (150 pages).

Morgan, C. Lloyd. Introduction to Comparative Psychology. W. Scott, Ltd., London, 1902. 382 pages.

Preyer, Wilhelm. Mind of the Child: Part I, The Senses and Will; Part II, The Development of the Intellect (translated by H. W. Brown). D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1888-1889. 2 vols.

Perez, Bernard. The First Three Years of Childhood. Bardeen, Syracuse and London, 1899. 294 pages.

Ribot, Th. Diseases of the Will (2d edition). Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1896. 137 pages.

Ribot, Th. Psychology of Attention. Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1890. 137 pages.

Ribot, Th. Psychology of the Emotions. W. Scott, Ltd., London, 1897. 455 pages.

Romanes, G. J. Mental Evolution in Animals. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1900. 411 pages.

Romanes, G. J. Mental Evolution in Man. D, Appleton & Co., New York, 1889. 452 pages.

Shinn, Milicent W. Biography of a Baby. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York, 1900. 247 pages.

Shinn, Milicent W. Notes on the Development of a Child, University of California Studies, Berkeley, California, 1893-1899.

Sully, James. The Human Mind, Vol. II, pp. 122-171. Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1892.

Sully, James. Studies of Childhood. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1896. 193 pages.

Stout, G. F. Manual of Psychology, pp. 393-434. Hinds, Noble & Co., New York, 1899. 643 pages.

Thorndike, Edward L. "Mental Life of Monkeys," Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, Vol. III, No. 5, 1901. 57 pages. Thorndike, Edward L. Animal Intelligence. Macmillan, New York,

1898.

Thorndike, Edward L. "Intelligence of Monkeys," Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LIX, pp. 273–279, July, 1901.

Wundt, Wilhelm. Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (translated by Creighton and Titchener). Macmillan, London and New York, 1894. 454 pages.

THE STORY OF A SAND PILE

The town of B— is a quiet community of a few score families of farmers, some twenty or thirty miles from Boston. Among the few cottagers who spend the summer months there is the Rev. Dr. A- -, a professor at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and widely known as an author. The family consists of Mrs. A and two bright, healthy boys, now fourteen and twelve, whom I will here call, respectively, Harry and Jack. Nine summers ago the mother persisted, not without some inconvenience, in having a load of fine clean sand hauled from a distant beach and dumped in the yard for the children to play in. What follows might be called a history of that load of sand, which I will try to sketch in the most literal and unadorned way, as I saw and heard of it, for the sake of its unique educational interest.

The "sand pile" at once became, as every one who has read Fröbel or observed childish play would have expected, the one bright focus of attraction, beside which all other boyish interests gradually paled. Wells and tunnels; hills and roads like those in town; islands and capes and bays with imagined water; rough pictures drawn with sticks; scenes half reproduced in the damp, plastic sand and completed in fancy; mines of ore and coal, and quarries of stone, buried to be rediscovered and carted to imaginary markets, and later a more elaborate half-dug and half-stoned species of cave dwelling or ice house- beyond such constructions the boys probably did not go for the first summer or two. The first and oldest "house," of which tradition survives, was a board pegged up on edge with another slanted against it, under which toys were taken from the nursery to be sheltered from