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This paper, short and very slight as it is, raises a question of interest to psycho-analysts, especially to those concerned with children's training in home or school. The facility of the child to pick up foreign languages compared with the difficulty experienced by the average adult in so doing is certainly striking, as the writer says, and worthy of further investigation. He illustrates his theme from the case of European children in India, showing how children of English parents, born in India, can, at the age of three or four years, converse freely with their parents in English, with their ayahs in Bengali, with the house-servants in Hindustani, with the garden-coolies in Santali, while the parents have barely succeeded, with much effort, in learning sufficient Hindustani to give simple intelligible orders to the house-servants. A specially striking case is given of a child of four years whose Bengali ayah was taken ill and in her place was substituted for two months only a Tamil-speaking ayah: in the space of the two months the child learnt to understand and talk in Tamil, without effort, and sometimes continued to talk this language, after the nurse had departed, to the other servants who could not understand Tamil.
The writer also observes that English-born children, even if brought out to India at the age of three or four, will just as easily and quickly learn to understand and to speak all the vernaculars of their district.
He puts forward as his hypothesis that the child's capacity for learning languages must be 'of a sub-conscious nature', not a matter of intelligence and intellectual effort, since in these respects the parents are obviously far superior to the child, and yet they fall far short of the child's achievements: the child can intuitively place the correct meaning into the spoken sounds, which capacity he loses almost altogether with his approach to adult life. The writer concludes: 'On no other hypothesis can the facts related above be in