forth, that reach the baby's hands. There is no reason at all why a
child's attention should be so predominantly fixed on wool. These toys
are coloured very tastefully, but as Preyer has advanced strong reasons
for supposing that the child's discrimination of colours is extremely
rudimentary until the second year has begun, these tasteful
arrangements are simply an appeal to the parent. Light, dark, yellow,
perhaps red and "other colours" seem to constitute the colour system of
a very young infant. It is to the parent, too, that the humorous and
realistic quality of the animal forms appeal. The parent does the
shopping and has to be amused. The parent who ought to have a doll
instead of a child is sufficiently abundant in our world to dominate
the shops, and there is a vast traffic in facetious baby toys,
facetious nursery furniture, "art" cushions and "quaint" baby clothing,
all amazingly delightful things for grown-up people. These things are
bought and grouped about the child, the child is taught tricks to
complete the picture, and parentage becomes a very amusing afternoon
employment. So long as convenience is not sacrificed to the aesthetic
needs of the nursery, and so long as common may compete with "art"
toys, there is no great harm done, but it is well to understand how
irrelevant these things are to the real needs of a child's development.

A child of a year or less has neither knowledge nor imagination to see
the point of these animal resemblances--much less to appreciate either
quaintness or prettiness. That comes only in the second year. He is
much more interested in the crumpling and tearing of paper, in the
crumpling of chintz, and in the taking off and replacing of the lid of
a little box. I think it would be possible to devise a much more
entertaining set of toys for an infant than is at present procurable,
but, unhappily, they would not appeal to the intelligence of the
average parent. There would be, for example, one or two little boxes of