570 SAVAGES AND CHILDREN. 



ever frequently it may vary ; they have no project which is to 

 be pursued from day to day, the subject of unremitted anxiety 

 and solicitude, that first rushes into the mind when they 

 awake in the morning, and is last dismissed when they sleep 

 at night. Yet if we admit that they are upon the whole 

 happier than we, we must admit that the child is happier 

 than the man, and that we are losers by the perfection of our 

 nature, the increase of our knowledge, and the enlargement of 



our views." 



We know the difficulty which children find in pronouncing 

 certain sounds : r and /, for instance, they constantly confound. 

 This is the case also among the Sandwich Islanders and in 

 the Ladrones, according to Freycinet ;* in Vanikoro ;( among 

 the Danimaras ;| and in the Tonga Islands. Mr. Darwin 

 observed that the Fuegians had great difficulty in compre- 

 hending an alternative; and every one must have noticed 

 the tendency among savages to form words by re-duplication. 

 This also is characteristic of childhood among civilized races. 



Again, some of the most brutal acts which have been 

 recorded against them are to be regarded less as instances of 

 deliberate cruelty, than of a childish thoughtlessness and im- 

 pulsiveness. A striking, instance of this is recorded by Byron 

 in his narrative of the Loss of the Wager. A cacique of the 

 Chonos, who was nominally a Christian, had been out with 

 his wife to fish for sea-eggs, and having had little success, 

 returned in a bad humour. "A little boy of theirs, about 

 three years old, whom they appeared to be doatingly fond of, 

 watching for his father and mother's return, ran into the surf 

 to meet them: the father handed a basket of eggs to the child, 

 which being too heavy for him to carry, he let it fall, upon 

 which the father jumped out of the canoe, and catching the 



* Vol. ii. pp. 260, 519. t Vol. v. p. 218. 



Galton, Tropical South Africa, p. 181. 

 Mariner's Tonga Island*, vol. i. p. 30. 



