STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 355 



ward. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what 

 his mother had done without him happened one day to be passing 

 a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed 

 with perfect gravity, " There are no pumps in heaven where I 

 came from." He had evidently thought out the fiction of the 

 God-sent baby to its logical consequences, and after taxing in 

 vain his prenatal memory had arrived at the conclusion that 

 pumps were not of heaven's furniture. 



Children appear to have very vague ideas about the past. On 

 the one hand, as in the case of their measurements of space, their 

 standard of time is not ours ; an hour, say the first morning at 

 school, may seem an eternity to a child's consciousness. The 

 days, the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get 

 older. On the other hand, as in the case of space-judgment, too, 

 the child, through his inability to represent time on a large scale, 

 is apt to bring the past too near the present. Mothers and young 

 teachers would be surprised if they knew how children interpreted 

 their first historical instruction introduced by the common phrase 

 " Many years ago," or similar expressions. Here is an illustrative 

 anecdote sent in by the aunt of the child, a boy of five years and 



a half : " H was beginning to have English history read to 



him, and had got past the ' Romans,' as he said. One day he 

 noticed a locket on my watch chain, and desired that it should be 

 opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long be- 

 fore. He asked about them. I told him they died before I was 

 born. * Did father know them ? ' he asked. ' No, they died be- 

 low he was born.' ^Then who knew them and when did they 

 live ? ' he asked, and as I hesitated for a moment, seeking how to 

 make the matter plain, ^Was it in the time of the Romans?' 

 he gravely asked." The odd-looking historical perspective here 

 was quite natural. He had to localize the babies' existence some- 

 where, and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the 

 one far-off time of which he had heard, and which presumably 

 covered all that was before the lifetime of himself and of those 

 about him. 



We may now pass to another group of children's ideas a group 

 already alluded to those which have to do with the invisible 

 world, with death and what follows, with God and heaven. Here 

 we find an odd patchwork of thought, the patchwork-look being 

 due to the heterogeneous sources of the child's information, his 

 own observations of the seen world on the one hand and the ideas 

 supplied him by what is called religious instruction on the other. 

 The characteristic activity of the child-mind, so far as we can dis- 

 engage it, is seen in the attempt to co-ordinate the disparate and 

 seemingly contradictory ideas into something like a coherent 

 system. 



