240 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



DK. PLOSS ON "THE CHILD." 



By EDWAED B. TYLOE. 



DR. PLOSS'S monograph on " The Child" at 

 once takes its place among the handbooks 

 of the science of Culture. Its plan is to bring to- 

 gether and discuss in a systematic way the ideas 

 and habits of all nations as to the birth and early 

 treatment of their offspring. How have different 

 peoples come to fix their various rules for the 

 dieting, clothing, cradling, carrying, doctoring, 

 naming, consecrating, diverting, and teaching of 

 children, and which ways are best for the public 

 welfare ? Here are two sets of inquiries, which 

 are too generally carried on separately, as though 

 one belonged, so to speak, to the Anthropological 

 Institute, and the other to the Social Science Con- 

 gress. Dr. Ploss's work is to be commended for 

 the way in which the ethnological and practical 

 sides are worked together and made to throw 

 light on one another. He is, no doubt, right also 

 in following the principle that all such customs 

 had originally a practical intention, however ab- 

 surd the purpose or the way of carrying it out 

 may seem from our point of view. It so happens 

 that the treatment of babies, being everywhere in 

 the conservative hands of grandmothers and old 

 nurses, has to an extreme degree kept up archaic 

 ideas, even in modern Europe. It is the old wives 

 who, in spite of the doctors' protests, still swad- 

 dle infants in Germany like live mummies, to pre- 

 vent their growing crooked. It is they who give 

 the children medicine to prevent their being ill, 

 and keep up the use of nostrums which curious 

 inquirers may trace back through the middle ages 

 to Hippocrates and Galen, and wonder how old 

 they were then. Nations, dynasties, faiths, may 

 rise and fall, but old wives' tales hold on. Some- 

 times, indeed, a new name and adaptation is fit- 

 ted to the old idea, as when the Three Fates or 

 Norns give up to the " Three Maries " the task 

 of spinning the child's thread of life ; but there 

 need not even be this change — in Albanian folk- 

 lore the three classic Moirai (Mire) still deal out 

 its destiny. Of all the many relics of early re- 

 ligion mentioned in the present book, perhaps 

 none carries us so far back into the region of 

 primitive animism as the Swiss peasant custom 

 when a mother dies in child-birth, of putting a 

 pair of shoes into her coffin that she may come 

 back for six weeks to tend the child, for else she 

 may appear and complain that she has to walk 



barefoot through the thistles and thorns. If moth- 

 er and child both die, they give her needle and 

 thread and soap, that she may do her sewing and 

 washing for it. North American Indians or South- 

 Sea Islanders could hardly go beyond this, or do 

 it with much clearer intent. If, then, ideas so 

 ancient can be kept up in the midst of modern 

 cultured nations, how much further may the nur- 

 sery customs of the barbarians have carried on 

 unbroken clews to guide our minds back into the 

 prehistoric world ! 



The plan of looking for practical purpose at 

 the origin of every custom is particularly appli- 

 cable to those which may have been at first sani- 

 tary rules settled by habit for the public benefit, 

 but which now present themselves under the more 

 solemn aspect of sacred rites, and are even claimed 

 as enjoined on man by divine revelation. On these 

 customs our author, in his double capacity of 

 physician and ethnologist, gives an opinion of some 

 weight. Thus, he insists on the hygienic useful- 

 ness of the widely-distributed customs and ordi- 

 nances as to the separation and purification of 

 mothers (chapter iii.). North and South Amerr-V 

 cans, Polynesians, Tartars, African negroes, are 

 alike in having as to this matter severe rules se 

 verely enforced, though they often can give no 

 further reason for them than ancestral tradition, 

 and fear that harm would come if they were set 

 aside. From the similarity of the rules ordained in 

 the great Old World religions, such as Brahmanism 

 and Parsism on the Aryan side, and Judaism and 

 Mohammedanism on the Semitic side, it can hard- 

 ly be doubted that what the law-givers of these 

 faiths did was to adopt, with more or less modifi- 

 cation, an already existing customary law, reenact- 

 ing it under new religious sanction. It is curious 

 to notice how nearly this particular group of so- 

 cial rules has disappeared, at any rate as express 

 ordinances, from Christendom, where little is left 

 except a few popular superstitions and the rite 

 of " churching," which is the scarcely recogniza- 

 ble descendant of the Jewish purification. An- 

 other wide-lying custom, familiar to us from its 

 forming part of the Levitical law, is circumcision, 

 but the study of its distribution over the world 

 makes it probable that here again we have a case 

 of prehistoric custom being adopted into national 

 law (chapter xiv.). There is no reason to assume 



