738 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made honey, he observed pertinently enough from his teleological 

 standpoint, " Then do they bring it for us to eat ? " 



Tlie idea underlying this questioning as to uses is the same 

 idea which the theological optimists of the last century were wont 

 to drive to such a surprising length. Their amusing speculations 

 showed how far from easy it Is to apply the idea to particular 

 cases, and our small philosopher evidently saw the difficulty in 

 the case of the bees, not by any means one of the most difficult. 



A child's question may be prompted merely by ignorance and 

 curiosity, or by a deeper motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery, 

 or contradiction. It is not always easy to distinguish the two 

 types of question, yet in many cases at least its form, and the 

 manner of putting, it will tell us that it issues from a puzzled and 

 temporarily baffled brain. As long as the questioning goes on 

 briskly, we may infer that a child believes in the possibility of 

 knowledge, and does not know the deepest depths of intellectual 

 despair. More pathetic than the saddest of questions is the 

 silencing of questions by the loss of faith. 



It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled 

 with much which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions 

 to the rule don't trouble the grown-up persons, just because as re- 

 current exceptions they seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus 

 adults, though quite unversed in hydrostatics, would be incapable 



of being puzzled by C 's problem, why my putting my hand in 



water does not make a hole in it. Similarly, though they know 

 nothing of animal physiology, they are never troubled by the 

 mystery of fish breathing under water, which when first noted by 

 a child may come as a sort of shock. The little boy just referred 

 to, in his far-reaching zoological interogatory asked his mother, 

 " Can they (the fish) breathe with their mouf s under water ? " 



In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from 

 others, the child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. 

 The same boy was much exercised about the sea and where it 

 went to. He expressed a wish to take ofi^ his shoes and to walk 

 out into the sea so as to see where the ships go to, and was mucli 

 troubled on learning that the sea got deeper and deeper and that if 

 he walked out into it he would be drowned. At first he denied the 

 paradox (which he at once saw) of the incoming sea going uphill. 

 " But, mamma, it doesn't run up, it doesn't run up, so it couldn't 

 come up over our heads ? " He was told that this was so, and he 

 wisely began to try to accommodate his mind to this startling 



revelation. C , too, was much exercised by this problem of the 



moving mass of waters, wanting to know whether it came half- 

 way up the world. Probably in both these cases the idea of water 

 rising had its uncanny, alarming aspect. 



We have seen that the disappearance of a thing is at a very 



