192 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the purpose of explaining the shining through of moon and stars. 

 Stars are, as we know, commonly thought of by the child as holes 

 in the sky letting through the light beyond. One Boston child 

 ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain 

 the appearance of the moon when one half is bright and the other 

 faintly illumined, supposing it to be halfway through the par- 

 tially diaphanous floor. Others, again, prettily accounted for the 

 waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or 

 half buttoned into the sky. 



As with the savage, so with the child, the heavenly bodies seem 

 to be personified spontaneously, and quite independently of theo- 

 logical instruction. A little boy, two years and two months old, 

 sitting on the floor one day in a great temper, looked up and saw 

 the sun shining, and said angrily, " Sun not look at Hennie," and 

 then, when he found this unavailing, " Please, sun, not look at poor 

 Hennie." * Many children seem quite spontaneously to apperceive 

 stars as eyes, and the moon of course as a human face. 



The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are simi- 

 larly apperceived b.y the help of ideas of movements of familiar 

 terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston 

 children half mythologicallj'', half mechanically, to roll, to fly, to 

 be blown (like a soap bubble or balloon), and so forth. The 

 anthropocentric form of teleological explanation is apt to creep 

 in, as when a Boston child said charmingly that the moon comes 

 round when people forget to light some lamps. Theological 

 ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of explanation, as when 

 the disappearance of the sun is variously attributed to God's 

 pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and 

 putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously 

 not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather 

 more of Nature-observation in the idea of another child that the 

 sun after setting lies under the trees, where angels mind it. But 

 I confess that many of these answers of the Boston children look 

 to me more like attempts of vacuous minds to invent something 

 smart on the spur of the moment than spontaneous growths 

 pre-existing before the questioner appears on the scene. 



The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise 

 in the case of the child, as in that of the Nature-man, to some fine 

 myth-making. The American children, as already observed, 

 have different mechanical illustrations for setting forth the 

 modus of the supernatural action here, thunder being thought 

 of now as God groaning, now as his walking loud on the floor 

 of heaven (cf. the old Norse idea that thunder is caused by 

 the r(jlling of Thor's chariot), now as his hammering, now as 



* See note by E. M. Stevens, Mind, vol. xi, p. 150. 



