THE PROBLEMS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 45 



three matches were not distinguished from, four matches, and 

 " too much " and " too little " were confounded in the same way 

 as " five and two." Children's notions of time are equally defect- 

 ive. M. Perez mentions a child describing a year as " many, many, 

 many to-morrows," which expression is doubtless as exact as the 

 underlying idea. The same child could not be taught the differ- 

 ence between " yesterday " and " the day before yesterday." In a 

 statistical research it was found that, of children ready to begin 

 their school life, eight per cent did not comprehend the meaning 

 of three, seventeen per cent of four, and twenty-eight per cent of 

 five. 



The similarities between the mental processes of child and 

 savage are far from being exhausted by this sketchy enumeration ; 

 it may indeed be maintained that the most interesting and charac- 

 teristic have not yet been mentioned — those that depend upon 

 similarities of imagination and general mental development. 

 Both savage and child are ignorant of the laws of Nature, and the 

 part that is taken by science and knowledge among the civilized 

 and adult is in them filled by a vivid imagination, substituting 

 faint and fanciful analogies for logic, and flourishing upon a 

 naive credulity. Consider what a large part chance and luck, 

 which have been aptly termed the measure of our ignorance, play 

 in the lives of savages and children. To the savage an appeal to 

 chance takes place upon every occasion, and the issue is regarded 

 as the expression of a powerful force ; the same grade of concepts 

 have a most tenacious hold upon children. What boy has not 

 carried an odd stone, or an old penny, or a pet marble, for 

 " luck " ? To what boy would not the reasoning of the Indian 

 who prefers " a hook that has caught a big fish to a handful that 

 have never been tried," not seem natural and valid ; although he 

 might not go so far as the Bushmen, " who despise an arrow that 

 has once failed of its mark," and so rather make new ones than 

 collect those that have missed ? How many childish superstitions 

 are based upon a tracing of cause and effect with no stronger 

 evidence than that of the people whose chief died after breaking 

 off the anchor of a stranded vessel, and who accordingly bowed to 

 the anchor, trying to appease its revenge ! When a boy tosses a 

 second penny after one that is lost in order to find it, perhaps re- 

 peating a formula in so doing, or when he takes care not to step 

 on the cracks between paving-stones in going to school for fear of 

 failing in his lessons, he is actuated by a train of thought easily 

 paralleled among almost any primitive people. When the Malays 

 eat tiger, " to acquire the sagacity as well as the cunning of that 

 animal," or the Dyaks refuse to eat deer for fear of becoming 

 faint-hearted, or the Caribs eschew pigs and tortoises for fear of 

 having their eyes grow small, " the idea may seem absurd to us," 



