190 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



been able to ascertain. As we shall see, they seem to be mainly 

 occupied with the mystery of our being able to move our limbs 

 when we wish to do so. The idea has occurred to me that chil- 

 dren's passion for pulling flowers to pieces may be prompted in 

 part by a vague expectation of finding the mechanical secret of 

 their growth and of the opening and shutting of their petals. 

 Movement plays, I believe, the chief part in children's first ideas 

 of the life of plants, though this idea grows more definite when 

 they get knowledge of their fading and dying. 



Next to movement apparently spontaneous sound appears to 

 be a common motive for attributing life to inanimate objects. 

 Are not movement and phonationthe two great chann^sls of utter- 

 ance of the child's own impulses ? A little boy assured his teacher 

 that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. 

 The ascription of life to fire is greatly aided by the observation of 

 its sputtering, crackling noises. The impulse, too, illustrated in 

 the case given above, to endow so little organic-looking an object 

 as a railway engine with conscious life was probably supported 

 by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. M. Pierre Loti, 

 when as a child he first saw the sea, regarded it as a living mon- 

 ster, no doubt on the ground of its movement and its noise. The 

 personification of the echo by the child, of which George Sand's 

 reminiscences give an excellent example, as by uncultured man, is 

 a signal illustration of the suggestive force of a voicelike sound. 



Closely connected with this impulse to ascribe life to what older 

 people regard as inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive them 



as growing. This is illustrated in the remark of the boy C that 



his stick would in time grow bigger. On the other hand, there is 

 in the Worcester collection a curious story of a little American 

 boy of three years, who, having climbed up into a large wagon 

 and being asked, " How are you going to get out ? " replied, " I 

 can stay here till it gets little and then I can get out my own self." 

 We shall see presently that shrinkage or diminution of size is 

 sometimes attributed by the child-mind to people when getting 

 old. So that we seem to have in each of these cases the extension 

 to things generally of an idea first formed in connection with the 

 observation of human life. 



Children's ideas of natural objects are anthropomorphic, not 

 merely as reflecting their own life, but as modeled after the anal- 

 ogy of the effects of human action. Thus I find that they are apt 

 to extend the ideas broken and mended to objects generally. Any- 

 thing which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of 

 itself is said to be " broken." A little boy of three years, on see- 

 ing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked, " The moon is 

 broken." On the other hand, in the case of one little boy every- 

 thing intact was said to be mended. We can not, of course, infer 



