beaches, river banks and brooks during the summer months could attest to boys' love for water. Under severest protest they will run away to go swimming, and undoubtedly more cases of school truancy in the summer are attributable to this attraction than any other. One gentleman of middle age says that nothing is so restful to him as to plunge into the water and float around, oftentimes upon his back, gazing into the soft blue sky.

This universal love for water seems not to be due to experience alone, for all babes exhibit it in their earliest days, if conditions are supplied. It seems partly instinctive and of more than recent philogenic origin, and at least suggests a survival of the old time life in an aquatic medium. This is not demonstrable, but the weight of all testimony is in that direction. How else can we account for the passionate love of children to paddle, to splash, ride on rafts, run out in the rain; for their intense delight in swimming, even going without meals, walking long distances, enduring severe punishments, etc., just for the sake of being in the water? Many of these characteristics are exhibited by adults when the conventionalities of civilized life can be thrown off.

Pedagogic Significance. The natural tendency of children to get near to nature, indicates that while children are passing through this animistic stage that they can be brought into sympathy with the great book of nature without appealing to artificial and esoteric interests. They already commune with nature and should be encouraged and aided in understanding and appreciating more of its beauties. At this stage it should not be minutely dissected and studied apart from its natural setting. The child idea of oneness and harmony should not be carelessly destroyed. Injudicious teaching may create ideas that the soundest philosophical teaching of maturer years will fail to correct. The unity of nature which the child mind and the savage instinctively apprehend should be strengthened, not weakened. Nature should not be dissected and sliced and teased apart until nothing related remains. By so proceeding all interest is destroyed and the most fundamental and important lessons to be taught are abortive. The child on looking at the ocean or river or streamlet, feels them to be sentient beings like himself only of a different form. Even older persons say they seem so, and some say they are happier in the instinctive feeling that water has a kinship of life with them than when conceiving it otherwise. The ocean's boundlessness produces feelings of nature's vastness and one's own insignificance. Awe, humility, and reverence, the basal ideas in religion, are prompted, as so many of the returns show, by gazing upon vast bodies of water.

The various forms of water are most eloquent teachers. They appeal to the child's imagination in a way that no human being could. So many say that they want to be alone by the water to contemplate, to reflect. Their thoughts are turned from the disunited artificial life, enforced by the usual modes of living, and turned toward the unity and harmony which they discover for themselves when brought into contact with nature. Contact with nature is a more genuine eloquent exhortation to a contemplation of the Divine than all the preachers without the aid of nature. When alone with the forests, the rocks, or the deep, for companions, one's thoughts turn instinctively toward the contemplation of the universal, which cannot but lead to a search for the primal cause, for the constant, the all powerful,-for God.

From a purely pedagogical point of view the study has much suggestiveness. The child that is impressed with the thought of "how large the world must be!" and with "wonder about what could be seen if the eye could penetrate space" has aroused in him the most fundamental conditions of the learner, viz., wonder and curiosity. A permanent interest of this general form is to be most earnestly sought in all instruction. To wonder what and why, and to determine to understand more, is the highest type of interest. It surpasses all the passing, definable, artificial interests. This is interest selfdetermined, and if cultivated will prove permanent.

Child life loves nature. These returns show that many of the happiest of childhood hours are spent directly in contact with it. To separate the child from nature is like separating the savage from his forest home. The child, like the race, may develop later interests in other directions, but the transition must be natural and gradual, and the feeling of oneness with nature should never be relinquished. From the wading and paddling and swimming in the brook, and from the sound of the merry music of brook and cascade to the more mature contemplation of the majestic ocean, there is a charm and a delight which are the rightful heritage of childhood and youth. To rob childhood of the beauties and teachings of nature is to do violence to the normal course of development. The childhood of the race was spent in delightful contact with nature; the child, ontogenetically recapitulating the phylogenetic development of the race, craves instinctively for communion with nature.

I am indebted to President G. Stanley Hall for the assignment of the problem, and for much sympathy and many helpful suggestions in carrying out the foregoing research. In this place I also desire to express my gratitude to the other members of Clark University who have aided me in many ways in prosecuting the work.

INDIVIDUAL MEMORIES.

By F. W. COLEGROVE, Honorary Fellow in Psychology,

Clark University.

This paper comprises one of nine chapters which treat of memory or memories. The preceding sections contain (a) An Historical Orientation; (b) A Biological Orientation which treats of racial memory and traces the individual psychical memory through different stages of life from man down to the vorticella; (c) The Diseases of the Memory-an original study based upon new material; (d) The Relations of Brain to Mind; (e) Memories. The subsequent chapters treat of Apperception and Association, Attention and Interest, and the final chapter is a summary of the leading pedagogical principles suggested throughout the work. The purpose of this paper is to give the results of a study of the memories of normal people from nine months to ninety years of age.

At the outset a real difficulty is met which is well illustrated in the following extract from "Recollections of Childhood, by Sonya Kovalévski. She writes: "When I begin to sort out and classify my earliest recollections, the same thing always happens with me: these recollections disperse before me. At times it seems to me that I have found the first definite impression which has left a distinct trace in my memory; but as soon as I concentrate my thought on it for a while, other impressions of a still more remote period begin to peep forth and acquire form. And the difficulty of it is that I cannot myself in the least determine which of these impressions I really remember; that is to say, I cannot decide which of them I really lived through and which of them I only heard about later on,-in my childhood-and imagine that I recall, when, in reality, I only remember the accounts of them. Worse still I can never succeed in evoking a single one of these original recollections in all its purity; I involuntarily add to it something foreign during the very process of recalling it." She then describes a scene in childhood, and adds: “As I reflect upon the matter now, I think I must have been two or three years old, and that the scene took place in Moscow where I was born." After the first memory she recalls "a series of detached but tolerably clear pictures" as of "picking up pebbles," and "my sister's doll which I threw out of the carriage window."

So many people have had the experience described by this "marvel of mental development" that the question may fairly be asked-can most people ascertain their earliest memories with sufficient accuracy and certainty to render them trustworthy data for scientific results? In order to test whether the difficulty would prove insuperable, one hundred persons were personally interviewed, most of whom were more than sixtyfive years of age. The results of these interviews were such

as to lead to the belief that after all deductions are made there is a large residuum which is reliable. Moreover the very difficulty alluded to is explained, at least in part, by the hypothesis advanced later in this study. The questionnaire read as follows:

I. What is your earliest memory? However trivial, or childish, your earliest experience is wanted. Be sure that it is a memory and that no one has told you.

In 1, 2, 3, give your age at the time, at least the probable age. 2. In like manner, give your second and third earliest memories. What is your earliest recollection of your (a) father, (b) mother, (c) sister, (d) brother, (e) playmates, (f) of any injury from a fall or a blow?

3.

4. Of what four consecutive years have you the best recollection? 5. Of what four consecutive years, after the first four have you the poorest memory?

6. Can you state examples of false memories experienced? e. g. Have you recalled as real what you had merely dreamed, heard or read? Give, if possible, a case of transposed memory in which what happened earlier was recalled later, and what happened later was recalled earlier.

7. What book read before you were nine years of age do you recall best?

8. Do you recall pleasant or unpleasant experiences better? 9. What studies have best developed your memory?

Io. Give a condensed account of any case of loss of memory caused by a blow on the head, a fall or by disease.

II.

Describe fully any aids to memory which you have found useful. How do you fix in mind and recall (a) figures, dates, dimensions, (b) forms of faces, microscopic structures, leaves, crystals, patterns, figures on the wall, carpet or dress, phrases in music and the cut of dresses? (c). How do you fix and recall passages of prose and poetry, declamations, and recitations? Why and how do you memorize fine passages? In learning foreign languages, describe devices for fixing new forms and phrases. Describe your system of keeping appointments. What memorandum do you keep, what book is used and how do you make entries? As a student, how full notes do you take in the class room? How would you teach a boy to remember things on time? Do you store up facts and dates, with no definite idea of how you will use them?

12. State cases in which the memory is so good or bad, that it weakens the other powers of the mind.

13. Describe cases of exceptional forgetfulness in old and young, stating whether it was due to distraction, abstraction, loss of mental power, or heredity.

As a rule, does defect in memory in children appear in the field of things done, known or felt?

14. As you advance in years do you find the interval between the power to determine whether you have had an experience and the ability to define, locate and name the experience wider or narrower? How is this in the kindergarten, high school, college, middle life, and old age?

The tabulation required almost incessant labor for five months. The results were first tabulated' upon two rolls of paper whose combined length was fifty-two feet by one foot eight inches in breadth. A second tabulation was made in which the memories (which could be readily studied from the first tabulation) were arranged under a large number of headings (over sixty), these headings being drawn from the papers themselves. Such topics were used as novel occurrences, repeated or protracted occurrences, gustatory memories, auditory memories, memories of father, mother, brothers, sisters, more distant relatives, other persons, deaths and funerals, sickness and accidents to self, sickness and accidents to others, memories of time, number, etc. Under novel occurrences or single impressions were included such memories as, seeing the ocean for the first time, drowning a cat, pet bird died, etc. By protracted or repeated experiences were included such memories as bringing water for mother in a little pail, the dress a person wore, etc.

To this topical syllabus 1,658 replies were received in time for tabulation. Of this number 1,372 were from white people; 605 males and 767 females. 182 were from negroes; 94 males and 88 females. 104 returns were furnished by Indians; 64 males and 40 females. The Indians represented 25 different tribes. The tabulations were made according to age in periods as follows: I, ages 1-4: II, ages 5-9; III, ages 10-11; IV, ages 12-13; V, ages 14-15; VI, ages 16-17; VII, ages 18-19; VIII, ages 20-29; IX, 30-39, etc. The last decade was practically 80-89, although a few males and one female 90 years of age sent returns, which were tabulated separately. The purpose in tabulating two year periods from 10-20 was to note the changes in memory, if any occurred, during this period of growth. The returns furnished many memories besides the first three. While the whole number of early memories did not differ essentially in character from the first three, the former furnish broader data for safe conclusions.

The youngest child whose memory was obtained was eleven months of age. She had apparently two definite memories. These experiences may not enter into the list of permanent memories. Yet a few adults state that they remember expe

1 I am indebted to my wife for the painstaking tabulations.