356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Like tlie beginning of life, its termination, deatli, is one of tlie 

 recurring pnzzles of childhood. This might be illustrated from 

 almost any autobiographical reminiscences of childhood. Here 

 indeed, the mystery is rpade the more impressive and recurrent to 

 consciousness by the element of dread. A little girl of three years 

 and a half asked her mother to put a great stone on her head, be- 

 cause she did not want to die. She was asked how a stone would 

 prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic, " Because I 

 shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head, and peo- 

 ple who grow tall get old and then die." 



Death seems to be thought of by the unsophisticated child as 

 the body reduced to a motionless state, devoid of breath and un- 

 able any longer to feel or think. This is the idea suggested by 

 the sight of dead animals, which but few children, however closely 

 shielded, can escajDe. 



The first way of envisaging death seems to be as a temporary 

 state like sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of 

 two years and a half, on hearing from his mother of the death 



of,a lady friend, at once asked, " Will Mrs. P still be dead 



when we go back to London ? " 



The knowledge of burial leads the child to think much of the 

 grave. The instinctive tendency to carry on the idea of life and 



sentience with the buried body is illustrated in C ^s fear lest 



the earth should be put over his eyes. The following observation 

 from the Worcester collection illustrates the same tendency : " A 



few days ago H (aged four years and four months) came to 



me and said, ' Did you know they'd taken Deacon W to Graf- 

 ton r I,' Yes.^ H : ' Well, I s'pose it's the best thing. His 



folks' (meaning his children) 'are buried there, and they wouldn't 

 know he was dead if he was buried here.' " This reversion to 

 savage notions of the dead in speaking of a Christian deacon has 

 its humorous asjDect. It is strange to notice here the pertinacity 

 of the natural impulse. All thoughts of heaven were forgotten 

 in the absorbing interest in the fate of the body. 



Do children, when left to themselves, work out a theory of an- 

 other life, that of the soul away from the dead deserted body ? 

 It is of course difficult to say, all children receiving some instruc- 

 tion at least of a religious character respecting the future. One 

 of the clearest approaches to spontaneous child-thought that I 

 have met with here is supplied by the account of the Boston chil- 

 dren. " Many children," writes Prof. Stanley Hall, " locate all that 

 is good and imperfectly known in the country, and nearly a dozen 

 volunteered the statement that good people, when they die, go to 

 the country even here from Boston." The reference to good peo- 

 ple shows that the children are here trying to give concrete defi- 

 niteness to something that has been said by another. These 



