STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 



191 



from this last that the child thought everything in the world had 

 been broken and mended. He probably had no words for ex- 

 pressing the ideas " make whole " and " keep whole," and so made 

 an analogical use of the familiar word " mend." 



So far I have spoken for the most part of children's ideas about 

 near and accessible objects. Their notions of what is distant and 

 inaccessible are, as remarked, wont to be formed on the model of 

 the first. Here, however, their knowledge of things will be large- 

 ly dependent on others' information, so that the naive impulse of 

 childish intelligence has, as best it may, to work under the limita- 

 tions of others' words. 



It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind the reader that chil- 

 dren's ideas of distance before they begin to travel far are neces- 

 sarily very inadequate. They are disposed to localize the distant 

 objects they see, as the sun, moon, and stars, and the places they 

 hear about on the earth's surface, as near as possible. The ten- 

 dency to approximate things, as seen in the infant's stretching 

 out of the hand to touch the moon, lives on in the later impulse 

 to localize the sky and heavenly bodies just beyond the furthest 

 terrestrial object seen, as when a child thought they were just 

 above the church spire ; another, that they could be reached by 

 tying a number of ladders together ; another, that the setting sun 

 went just behind the ridge of hills, and so forth. The stars, as so 

 much smaller looking, seem to be located further off than the sun 

 and moon. Similarly, when a little Londoner hears of distant 

 places, as Calcutta, he tends to project them just beyond the fur- 

 thest point known to him, say St. Paul's, to which he was once 

 taken on a long journey from the West End. A child's standard 

 of size and distance is, as all know who have revisited the home of 

 their childhood after many years, very dilferent from the adult's. 

 To the little legs unused as yet to more than short spells of loco- 

 motion a mile seems stupendous ; and then the small brain can 

 not yet pile up the units of measurement well enough to conceive 

 of hundreds and thousands of miles. 



As all who have talked with children know and as inquiries 

 into the contents of the little Boston minds confirm, the child 

 thinks of the world as a circular plain, and of the sky as a sort of 

 inverted bowl upon it that is to say, he takes them to be what 



they look. In a similar manner C took the sun to be a great disk 



which could be put on the round globe to make seesaw. Heaven 

 is localized agreeably to what has been said about the tendency to 

 bring things as near as possible, just above the sky, which forms 

 its floor. Some genuine thought-work is shown in the effort to 

 adjust the various things seen and heard of respecting the celestial 

 region into something like a connected whole. Thus the sky is 

 apt to be thought of as thin, this idea being probably formed for 



