798 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



but they often show more than an entire apathy, even an actual pleas- 

 ure, at the sight of pain inflicted upon animals ; and some, with whom 

 we need not now concern ourselves, take a delight that to grown peo- 

 ple seems almost fiendish in tormenting their weaker playfellows. 



Of course, there are to be found instances, as rare as they are 

 delightful, of highly sympathetic children ; but such are to be dis- 

 criminated from the ordinary run of boys. The children who habit- 

 ually show this spirit are to be reckoned as moral prodigies, far above 

 the common level ; and they are no more to be compared in point of 

 morality with ordinary healthy boys than in point of intellectual power 

 John Stuart Mill, reading Lucan and Plato in his eighth year, is to be 

 compared with the primary pupils struggling through the mysteries 

 of " carrying " and " borrowing." Boys of fourteen who share our 

 feeling of pain at the useless shooting of a bluebird, who have no 

 instinctive impulse to maim a ground-squirrel by a well-aimed shot 

 from a sling, are examples of moral precocity. Like intellectual pre- 

 cocity, this may be very enjoyable to the family in which it occurs ; 

 but the probability is, that it is the accompaniment of some unhealthy 

 state, which may be entirely unobserved by the child's admiring but 

 undiscriminating friends. On the subject of intellectual precocity, 

 thanks to the able and tireless efforts of the apostles of the " new edu- 

 cation," many people now have sound notions, and the more sensible 

 mothers and fathers among us no longer desire to model their boys 

 after the pattern of the young Macaulay or Pascal. Indeed, not a 

 few of them have come to so enlightened a state that they actually 

 feel some wholesome alarm lest their "intellectual early risers," as 

 Professor Huxley has wittily said, should " be conceited all the fore- 

 noon of life and stupid all the afternoon." But, while the judicious 

 have thus become satisfied to see a child's mental powers rise slowly 

 and healthily from the first faint glimmer of intelligence to whatever 

 degree of vigor and brilliancy his endowment may enable them to 

 reach, yet very many people whom we can not class among the Boeo- 

 tians, and who count most of the authors of children's literature among 

 their number, seem confidently to expect a boy's moral nature, long 

 before his legs have outgrown his knickerbockers, to burst forth with 

 almost the fervor of Mr. Bergh's ebullient conscience. Doubtless they 

 are inexpressibly shocked when they learn, as in the course of things 

 they soon must, that the humane inpulse is as soundly dormant in the 

 breast of their ten-year-old offspring as in the bosom of a Fuegian or 

 a Guacho. 



But, when all the circumstances are considered, it will perhaps 

 appear that moral precocity is no more to be desired than intellect- 

 ual precocity, because the existence of either indicates that the devel- 

 opment of the child in which it appears is abnormal. An early appear- 

 ance of the sympathies depends upon an early development of mental 

 functions, which properly are dormant until later in life ; and pre- 



