Chapter V: Part 5

She seemed, by the latter part of the month, to understand vaguely a good deal that was said to her, when it was accompanied with a gesture. If I said, “Kiss aunty,” and offered my cheek, she would press her lips against it. She would look around to see if her mother shook her head with “No, no!” when she crept up to pull at the books on a low shelf. Her little list of accomplishments, waving and patting her hands, and so on, she would go through at the mere word, without any gesture.

One important development in the latter part of the month was a little imitative cry, something like mewing, associated with the cats--important because of its bearing on the beginnings of language. It has long been a dispute whether language began with imitation of the sounds of nature, or with spontaneous ejaculations--“the bow-wow theory and the pooh-pooh theory,” as they were scoffingly nicknamed early in the course of the discussion. Our baby may seem to have given the weight of her authority to the bow-wow theory, for this mewing cry did in fact slowly develop months later into a name for “cat,” and might be called the first remote foreshadowing of a spoken word. But on the whole, with her and with other babies, the early stages of speech confirm the best recent opinion--namely, that language is a complex product, into which both imitation and ejaculation enter, with perhaps still other elements.

About a week before the baby was nine months old, some one looked up from dinner and saw her standing by a lounge, steadied only by one hand pressed against it, while she waved the other in exultant joy. Her father sprang and caught her as she toppled, then set her on her feet within the circuit of his arms, but without support, for a few seconds. Her legs shook, but she stood without fear, in high delight.

After this, her standing at chairs grew rapidly freer and bolder, and the support she needed was daily less. At nine months old, she was absorbed in the desire to stand. She would hold on with one hand and lean down to pick up things with confidence and freedom. In the first week of the tenth month, she even liked to pull herself up to her feet, then deliberately let go, come down sitting with a thud, and look up laughing and triumphant. She evidently thought the coming down quite as fine an exploit as the getting up.

By this time she crept freely and rapidly, laughing with pleasure as she did so. If she was laid on a blanket on the lawn, she no longer tumbled about contentedly within its area, but struck off across the grass, stopping to investigate carefully any plant or fallen leaf she came across. The medley of positions and movements had disappeared, and creeping and standing, as the fittest, had survived.

Within a week after she was nine months old, the baby began to get up to her feet by low objects, and then, instead of stooping over them, to abandon all support, straighten up, and stand alone for several seconds, greatly pleased with herself. Next she could stand a minute at a time, with such slight support as a fold of a gown in her hand, or in a corner, steadied only by her shoulders against the wall. She no longer plumped down to the floor, but lowered herself cleverly--once (in the second week of the month) without any support at all, having absent-mindedly let go of the chair. In a few days more, it was not uncommon for her to forget to hold on, and to stand a few seconds alone by a chair; and if she was at some one’s knee, where she felt more confidence, she would let go on purpose, and try deliberately to stand alone.

Now began a period of diligent self-training in standing. As I sat on the grass and the baby played beside me, she would put her hands on my knee, lift herself to her feet, and balance on them as long as she could--seven seconds at the most, in the second week of the month, a quarter of a minute in the third, if her attention was called away from her own balance by some interesting sight. She would totter, stretch out her arms to recover her balance, circle with them just as we do (the movement must be highly instinctive), come down with a jolt and a peal of baby laughter, scramble to my knees, and up again. People are foolish to go to the matinée for amusement if they have a chance, instead, to sit flat on a lawn on a summer day, and assist at a baby’s standing lessons.

In these days there was evident again an intangible but great increase in the little one’s mental alertness, her eager curiosity in following our movements, her look of effort to understand, her growing clearness in grouping associations and interpreting what she saw.

Her handling of things had long developed into elaborate investigation, turning an object over and examining every side, poking her fingers into crevices, opening and shutting lids, turning over the leaves of books; and now she was no longer satisfied with investigating such objects as she came across by chance--she began to have a passion (which increased for weeks and months, and long made up a great part of her life) to go and find what there was to see. She crept to the window and stood at the low sill, to look out, beating the pane with her soft little hands and laughing in an ecstasy of delight if the dog wandered by. She crept into the hall and explored it, sitting down in each corner to take a survey, and to look up the walls above her. Her toys were neglected; she was impatient of being held in arms, and eager only to get to the floor and use her new powers. She crept happily about for hours from chair to chair, from person to person, getting to her feet at each, and setting herself cleverly down again; smiling and crowing at each success, and coming to us for applause and caresses. She did not want to leave the floor for her meals, and was reconciled to them only if she might stand at her mother’s side and take her milk or porridge in small doses, interspersed with play. She ran away from us on hands and knees, laughing, if she thought we were about to pick her up.

Outdoors her happiness was even greater than in the month before, and her cries of rapture as she looked up, down, and around, and realized her own activity in the midst of all the waving and shining and blooming things, were remarkable--uttered, as it were, from the very deeps of her little soul, with that impassioned straining of the central muscles by which a baby throws such abandon of longing or ecstasy into his voice. We seem to have lost the vivid expressiveness of primitive cries in getting the precision and convenience of articulate words.

The sights and sounds of outdoors now contributed greatly to the little girl’s joy there. She had for some weeks noticed sounds more than ever before--the tapping of a woodpecker, for instance, or the stamping of a horse in the stable--and now she was quick to look and listen at the note of a bird. She watched the birds, too, for the first time, as they flew from tree to tree; and the profuse California flowers were objects of incessant desire and pleasure.

The power of communication was considerably increased in this month by the acquisition of one exceedingly useful sign. The way in which it was developed is an interesting example of the evolution of such signs. First the baby began to use her forefinger tip for specially close investigations; at the same time she had a habit of stretching out her hand towards any object that interested her--by association, no doubt, with touching and seizing movements. Combining these two habits, she began to hold her forefinger separate from the others when she thus threw out her hand towards an interesting object; then, in the second week of the month, she directed this finger alone towards what interested her; and by the third week, the gesture of pointing was fairly in use. She pointed to the woodshed door, with her mewing cry, when she wished to see the kittens; to the garden door, with pleading sounds, when she wished to be taken thither; to the special bush from which she wished a rose. She pointed in answer, instead of merely looking, when we asked, “Where is grandpa?” “Where is Muzhik?”

These questions can hardly have been understood, as questions; but it was more than ever clear that she got some idea from a good deal that we said, and now by the words alone, without the help of gestures. Doubtless she knew several simple words--words of coming and going, of food, of the kittens and the dog and the horse.

All this time she had shown no great improvement in walking movements when held from above, and she had no particular ambition to walk. But in the last week of the month she began to edge along by the side of a chair, holding to it--a great advance.

The first attempts at climbing, too, appeared before she was quite ten months old. In the third week of the tenth month the baby had let herself down by her hands quite cleverly from a large chair in which she had been scrambling about--a feat that must have been quite instinctive, since she did it well and easily at the first try. The last day of the month, as she hovered at the foot of the stairs (a region about which she had much unsatisfied curiosity), some one helped her to put her knee on the lower step. Thereupon she laid hold on the next one, and pulled herself up, and with the same help, mounted two steps more. At this point her aunty’s stereotyped appeal, “Don’t help her! let her alone, and let me see what she will do!” prevailed. A candle was set on a higher step as a lure, and, sure enough, the little thing, unaided, set her knee on the higher level, laid hold with her hands, and drew herself up. It is significant that true climbing movements should be so early and so easily caught at a single partial lesson; and I shall have occasion to say more about it before the story of the baby’s first year closes.

In the very last days of the tenth month came a wonderful spring upward in the little one’s intelligence about her surroundings, and in her power of communicating with us. It involved the real beginning of spoken words--for the cat cry of the month before remained by itself, leading to nothing more, and though it was the first sound that expressed an idea, it was not from it, but from this later root, that spoken language sprang and grew.

But the mental and language progress of these few days, just as the baby came to ten months old, was the beginning of a stage of development that belonged to the later months--a beginning too important to be crowded in at the close of a chapter that is mainly concerned with movement development. So I keep the account of it for the story of the eleventh month.

XII

RUDIMENTS OF SPEECH; CLIMBING AND PROGRESS TOWARD WALKING

Talk before you go,
Your tongue will be your overthrow,

says the old saw. But perhaps our baby did not earn the ill omen, it was such a faint foreshadowing of speech that she was guilty of. Probably she would not have been detected in it at all, had not ten months’ practice made us pretty good detectives. Indeed, but for the notebook, by which I could compare from day to day the wavering approach to some meaning in her use of this or that syllable, I should not have dared to be sure there really was a meaning. It is in these formless beginnings of a beginning that we get our best clues (as in all evolutionary studies) to the real secrets of the origin of language.

The little girl, as she came to ten months old, was a greater chatterer than ever, pouring out strings of meaningless syllables in joy or sorrow, with marvelous inflections and changes--such intelligent remarks as “Nĕ-nĕ-oom-bo,” and “Ga-boo-ng,” and “A-did-did-doo,” and certain favored syllables over and over, such as “Dă-dă-dă.”

In the last four days of the tenth month we began to suspect a faint consistency in the use of several of the most common sounds. We began to think that something like “Dă!” (varying loosely to “Gă!” or “Dng!” or “Did-dă!” or “Doo-doo!” but always hovering round plain “Dă!”) was suspiciously often ejaculated when the little one threw out her hand in pointing, or exulted in getting to her feet; that “Nă-nă-nă!” was separating itself out as a wail of unwillingness and protest, and “Mă-mă-mă!” as a whimper of discontent, and loneliness, and desire of attention; while--nearest of all to a true word--a favorite old murmur of “M-gm” or “Ng-gng” recurred so often when something disappeared from sight that we could not but wonder if we had not here an echo of our frequent “All gone!”

All these sounds were used often enough at other times, and other sounds were used in their special places; yet week by week the notebook showed “Dă!” growing into the regular expression of discovering, pointing out, admiring, exulting; “Nă-nă-nă!” into that of refusal and protest; and “Mă-mă-mă,” which soon became “Mom-mom-mom,” into that of a special sort of wanting, which slowly gathered itself about the mother in particular. I do not think that these were echoes of our words “There!” and “No!” and “Mamma;” it was only slowly, and after the baby was a year old, that they came into unison with these words--and in the case of “Mamma,” not without some teaching. It is more likely that we have here a natural cry of pointing out, a natural negative, a natural expression of baby need and dependence, which give us a hint of the origin of our own words.

The fourth sound, however, which developed through many variations (such as “M-gâ,” “Gâ,” or “Gng”) to a clear “Gông,” “A-gông,” and even “Gone,” was plainly an echo. It was used as loosely as it was pronounced: the baby murmured “Ng-gng!” pensively when some one left the room; when she dropped something; when she looked for something she could not find; when she had swallowed a mouthful of food; when she heard a door close. She wounded her father’s feelings by commenting “M-gâ!” as her little hands wandered about the unoccupied top of his head. She remarked “Gông!” when she slipped back in trying to climb a step; when she failed to loosen a cord she wished to play with; when she saw a portière, such as she was used to hide behind; when she was refused a bottle she had begged for. It meant disappearance, absence, failure, denial, and any object associated with these.

In just this fashion, Preyer’s boy used his first word of human speech, at about this age. “Atta!” the little fellow would murmur when some one left the room, or when the light went out--using a favorite old babble of his own, just as our baby did, to help him get hold of a grown-up word, “Adieu” or “Ta-ta,” which carried the meaning he was after. The idea of _disappearance_--of the thing now seen, now gone--seems to take strong hold on babies very early; I have known several other cases.

In all this we seem to see quite clearly the first steps in language making. The baby begins slowly to turn some of his commonest chattering sounds to special uses--not to carry thought to other people, but as mere exclamations to relieve his own mind. It was just twice within her first year that our baby turned to me when some one left the room, looked in my face, and said “Gông!” At all other times it was only murmured to herself. And most of the exclamations express a mood rather than a real idea; they are halfway between mere cries and words proper. Even when there is plainly an idea, as in “All gone,” it is a big, vague blur of an idea, slowly taking form in the little mind, as the blurs of light and dark slowly outlined themselves into objects before the little eyes months before.

At this point the modern baby catches the trick of helping himself to our words ready made, and (though many glimpses of primitive speech show through the whole process of learning to talk) he thus saves himself in the main the long task of developing them, through which his ancestors toiled.

In fact, the next word our baby took into use, a fortnight later, was lifted bodily from our speech: a reproving “Kha!” by which we tried to disgust her with the state of her fingers after they had been plunged into apple sauce or like matters. She quite understood what it referred to, though she did not share our objection to messy fingers, and thereafter surveyed her own complacently in such plight, and commented, “Kha!” And I may here run ahead so far as to say that this was the full list of her spoken words within the first year, except that in the next month she used an assenting “Ĕ!” which may have been “Yes;” and in the last days of the year she began to exclaim first “By!” then “My!” (corrupted from “By-by”) in saying farewell.

During this fortnight of swift language development the little one’s progress in movements had been slight. But towards the middle of the eleventh month she took a fresh start. One day she raised herself to her feet without anything to hold to; stood on tiptoe to peer over the seat of her high chair; forgot to hold to me, in her eagerness for a fruit I was peeling, and stood alone for a minute and a half at least, while I peeled it and fed it into her mouth; clambered into my lap (as I sat beside her on the floor), setting one little foot up first, laying hold of my shoulder, and tugging herself up with mighty efforts.

She chanced, too, on the art of shoving a chair before her for a step or two; and the next day, in her eagerness to reach a glass of water her father was bringing, she took one unconscious forward step, which ended in prompt collapse on the lawn. But neither of these beginnings was followed up by any real advance in learning to walk. During the rest of the month she edged about more freely, and in the last week pushed chairs before her a little again; and if we supported her and urged her forward, she would walk clumsily, much as a puppy will if you lead him by the fore paws; but she seemed to find the movement scarcely more natural than the puppy does, and always wanted soon to drop down to all-fours.

But climbing was a different matter. Here the baby seemed laid hold of by strong desire and instinct. The day after she climbed into my lap, she spent a long time zealously climbing up a doorstep and letting herself down backward from it. The day after that, she tackled the stairs and climbed two steps. Later in the day, I set her at the bottom of the stairs and moved slowly up before her. The little thing followed after (her mother’s arms close behind, of course; no one would be crazy enough to start a baby upstairs without such precaution), tugging from step to step, grunting with exertion now and then, and exclaiming with satisfaction at each step conquered; slipping back once or twice, but undiscouraged--fifteen steps to the landing, where she pulled to her feet by the stair-post, hesitated, made a motion to creep down head first, then crept, laughing, across the landing, and up five steps more, and shouted with triumph to find herself on the upper floor. She even looked with ambition at the garret stairs, and started towards them; but an open door tempted her aside to explore a room, and she forgot the stairs.

For the rest of the month the baby dropped to hands and knees and scrabbled joyously for the stairs at every chance of open door; she was not satisfied without going up several times daily; and having people who believed in letting her do things, and insuring her safety by vigilance while she did them, instead of by holding her back, she soon became expert and secure in mounting. She made assaults, too, on everything that towered up and looked in the least climbable--boxes, chairs, and all sorts of things, quite beyond her present powers. She seemed possessed by a sort of blind compulsion towards the upward movement.

What are we to make of this strong climbing impulse, this untaught skill in putting up the foot or knee and pulling the body up, while walking is still unnatural? I sought out every record I could find, and the indications are that our baby was not an exception; that as a rule climbing does come before walking, if a baby is left free to develop naturally. Of course in many cases walking is artificially hastened and climbing prevented.

Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this: the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse to _pull up_, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up; the slow and doubtful development of creeping, as if the ancestral creature had been almost purely a tree-dweller, with no period of free running on all-fours.

Tree-dwelling creatures, living on the dainties of the forest, fruit and nuts and eggs and birds, are better nourished than the ground-roaming tribes; but that is not half the story. The tree mothers cannot tuck their babies away in a lair and leave them; the tree babies cannot begin early to scramble about, like little cubs--their dwelling is too unsafe. There is nothing for it but the mother’s arms; the baby must be held, and carried, and protected longer than the earth babies. That was the handicap of the tree life, our ancestors might have thought--the helpless babies. But, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, it was that long, helpless babyhood that gave the brain its chance to grow and made us human.

At eleven months old our little girl could stand alone as long as she cared to, though perhaps it was not till the next month that she felt altogether secure on her feet. She could climb up and down stairs with perfect ease. She could walk held by one hand, but she did not care to, and creeping was still her main means of getting anywhere.

Her understanding of speech had grown wonderfully, and as she was docile in obeying directions, I could always find out whether she knew a thing by name by saying, “Point to the rose,” or “Bring the book to aunty,” and thus found it possible to make out a trustworthy list of the words she knew: fifty-one names of people and things; twenty-eight action words, which she proved she understood by obeying (“give” and “sit down,” and the like), and a few adverbial expressions, like “where” and “all gone”--eighty-four words in all, securely associated with ideas. She understood them in simple combinations, too, such as, “Bring mamma Ruth’s shoes;” and often, where she did not know all the words in a sentence, she could guess quite shrewdly from those she did, interpreting our movements vigilantly.

For her own speech, the small set of spoken words she owned was of little use; indeed, as I have said, these were only exclamations. For talking to us she used a wonderfully vivid and delicate language of grunts, and cries, and movements. She would point to her father’s hat, and beg till it was given her; then creep to him and offer the hat, looking up urgently into his face, or perhaps would get to her feet at his side and try to put it on his head; when he put it on, up would go her little arms with pleading cries till he took her, and then she would point to the door and coax to be carried outdoors. She would offer a handkerchief with asking sounds when she wished to play peekaboo; or a whistle, to be blown; or a top, to be spun. When she was carried about the garden or taken driving, or when she crept exploring and investigating about the rooms, she would keep up a most dramatic running comment of interest, joy, inquiry, amusement, desire; and it was remarkable what shades of approval and disapproval, assent, denial, and request she could make perfectly clear.

XIII

WALKING ALONE; DEVELOPING INTELLIGENCE

And now our little girl was entered on the last month of the year--a month of the most absorbing activity, yet perhaps rather in practicing the powers she already had than in developing new ones. She added to the list of words she understood till it was impossible to make record of them all--new ones cropped up at every turn. She made the two small additions to her spoken words that I have already mentioned. She became perfectly secure in standing, and she was even more zealous to climb than before, making nothing, in the latter part of the month, of turning at the top of the stairs and sliding down, head first or feet first, rarely needing for safety the vigilant arms that always hovered ready to catch her.

For a time she made little advance towards walking, though she began now to show some pleasure and pride in being led about by the hand. But about the middle of the month the walking instinct seemed at last to stir. The little one had often stepped from chair to chair, keeping a hand on one till she had fairly hold of the other. If the gap was an inch wider than she could cross thus, she dropped down and crept. Now one day she looked at the tiny gap, let go her chair, stood longingly, made a movement as if to take the single step, and dropped ignominiously and crept; nor would she trust herself of her own accord to movement on her feet (though once her mother did coax her a few steps) for nearly a week. Then at last she ventured it.

I did not see the first exploit, but the next day I set her against the wall and told her to walk, and she would step forward with much sense of insecurity, tottering and taking tiny inches of steps, her legs spreading more widely at each one, till I caught her in my arms. Once I let her go as far as she could. She would not give up and sit down, but went on as far as her legs would carry her, tremulous, pleased, half afraid, half proud, and wholly conscious of doing something remarkable; and when at the seventh step she subsided to the floor, she was not in the least frightened, but got up readily and tottered on another six steps.

The next day she had weakened, however, and for several days she would not try again; and when she did try, she fell down after a single step. She wanted to try again, and crept back to the wall, stood up, laughed, waved her arms, made a false start, and could not quite find the courage. In the four days that remained of her first year she sometimes forgot herself and took a step or two; and she was perfectly able to take half a dozen any time, strong and steady on her feet; but it was not till shortly after the close of the year that she cast aside her fears and suddenly was toddling everywhere.

It was about the middle of the twelfth month that the little one added the useful sign of nodding to her means of communicating. She had been taught to nod as a mere trick the month before, and took to it at once, jerking her whole little body at every nod and priding herself mightily on it. Perhaps because of this pride and pleasure, it became after a time a sort of expression of approval: she greeted us with nodding in sign of pleasure when we came in; she nodded like a mandarin when she heard she was to go to ride. So now, when a pleasant suggestion was made, “Would Ruth like a cracker?” “Does Ruth want to go see the kitties?” her nod of approval soon passed into the meaning of assent; indeed, it began now to be joined with the grunt of “Ĕ!” that I have mentioned. She had a perfectly intelligible negative grunt, too, just such as grumpy grown people use, out of the primitive stock of their remotest ancestry, no doubt.

I was nearly taken in at one time by this cheerful nodding and “Ĕ!” The little lady used them so intelligently when she was offered something she wanted, and refused so consistently when offered what she knew she did not want, that I began to set down any question as understood if she said yes to it. But presently I had an inkling that when she did not know whether she wanted it or not, she said yes, on the chance--since most things prefaced by “Does Ruth want?” proved pleasant. So I asked her alluringly, “Does Ruth want a course in higher mathematics?”

The rosy baby looked at me gravely, waited with a considering air, as she always did, taking it in, nodded gravely, and said decisively, “Ĕ!”

“Does Ruth want to go and be a missionary in Raratonga?”

“Ĕ!” with no less decision.

I saved her confidence in my good faith by substituting something else as good, and more immediately practicable, for the mysterious attractions I had offered, and used due caution thereafter in recording her answers.

It was evident that in a primitive way the little one was comparing and inferring not a little by this time. A week before, her grandmother had told her which was O on a set of letter cards she played with, and presently she showed Q with an inquiring cry: “What is this that looks so much like O and yet is not O?” It may be added that she always knew O afterwards, and picked up most of the other letters as easily--an evidence of the unnecessarily hard work we make of learning the letters by postponing them till the normal age of picking up the name of anything and everything is past.

She was, of course, sometimes quaintly misled in an inference by lack of knowledge. In the last week of the month I shut my eyes and asked her, “Where are aunty’s eyes?” The baby tried in vain to find them behind the lids, and then leaned over from my lap and looked carefully for the lost eyes on the floor!

I hardly think that memory is much developed at this age; the probability is that even the two year old remembers things only in glimpses--one here and one there, but nothing continuous: this is one of the great differences between his mind and ours. But our little girl plainly remembered some things for days. In the second week of the month her uncle showed her how he lifted the window sash, and four days after, catching sight of the finger handle, she tugged at it with impatient cries, trying to make the sash go up. A few days later, having a flower in her hand when her feet were bare, she began, with a sudden memory, to beg to have something done to her toes with it, and it proved that two or three weeks before her mother had stuck a flower between the fat toes.

All this month, even more than in the eleventh, she was incessantly busy in exploring and learning. She opened boxes, took things out, and put them back; worked with infinite diligence and seriousness at such matters as getting a rubber ring off a notebook I had stretched it round; investigated crannies, spaces under grates, doors ajar, with an undying curiosity.

She began to imitate our actions more: she tried to comb her hair, to put flowers into a vase, to mark on a paper with a pencil; she pulled at her toes and muttered, as if she were saying the piggy rhyme.

She had a distinct idea as to what constituted herself, and when she was asked, “Where is Ruth?” she did not indicate her whole body, but always seized her head in her hands with certainty and decision.

She took delight in the new uses of mind and memory, no less than in her bodily powers; she would recall the association of an object and its name with joyous laughter, and her “Dă!” when she was asked to point to something was a cry of pleasure.

She had not an atom of moral sense, nor the least capacity of penitence or pity, but she was a friendly little thing, with no worse tempers than a resentful whimpering when she was put into her clothes--incumbrances that she much disliked. She was assiduous in putting her crackers into her friends’ mouths, whether for fun or for good-will; and it was not uncommon for her to throw herself, with kisses and clinging arms, about our necks after we had given her some specially valued pleasure, such as taking her outdoors. She was learning to coax effectively with kisses, too, when she wished very much to go.

And so the story of the swift, beautiful year is ended, and our wee, soft, helpless baby had become this darling thing, beginning to toddle, beginning to talk, full of a wide-awake baby intelligence, and rejoicing in her mind and body; communicating with us in a vivid and sufficient dialect, and overflowing with the sweet selfishness of baby coaxings and baby gratitude. And at a year old, there is no shadow on the charm from the perception that its end is near. By the second birthday we say, “Ah, we shall be losing our baby soon!” But on the first, we are eager, as the little one herself is, to push on to new unfoldings; it is the high springtime of babyhood--perfect, satisfying, beautiful.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.