46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



says Sir John Lubbock, " but not so to children. I have myself 

 heard a little girl say to her brother, ' If you eat so much goose 

 you will be quite silly/ and there are perhaps few children to 

 whom the induction would not seem perfectly legitimate/' 



Consider furthermore the world of fable and fairies, in which 

 children live and move, in which no laws are adhered to or trans- 

 gressed, in which nothing is impossible and nothing expected, and 

 we are in quite the same atmosphere as that in which savage myth 

 and belief flourish and multiply. Many such myths are doubt- 

 less earnest attempts at explaining natural phenomena, and we 

 can not but be struck with the fact that the childish attention is 

 spontaneously directed to the same kind of problems, and often 

 gives them very similar answers. The same mental tendency 

 invests inanimate objects with mysterious powers and creates the 

 belief in fetiches, in some occult connection between a force, 

 power, or demon, and something that is regarded as its repre- 

 sentative. The savage mind requires some concrete object upon 

 which to hang the epithets and work the spells; no matter by 

 what far-fetched analogy the two are regarded as connected, the 

 fetich serves as a substitute of a more abstract notion, too vague 

 for the savage's weak mind to retain. The name, the image, the 

 shadow, the picture, a part of the person or dress thus acquire 

 a peculiar relation to the person or object in question, and we 

 meet with names that are tabooed, sorcery with a man's shadow 

 or lock of hair, the dread of having one's picture taken, and 

 the like. Analogies to these procedures among children could 

 doubtless be traced had we a pertinent collection of their spon- 

 taneous sayings and doings. In the absence of such I must refer 

 to the childish habit of talking to animals and obtaining an- 

 swers from them, to their unquestioning faith in the personifi- 

 cations of fable, to the fact that of forty-eight children questioned 

 by Dr. Stanley Hall "twenty believed sun, moon, and stars to 

 live, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought flowers would 

 suffer pain if burned " ; or again, to the early and marked de- 

 velopment of the dramatic instinct, that transforms everything 

 and everybody into something else, and invests prosaic objects 

 with an endless variety of qualities and histories. This is the 

 function of toys ; they form the lay figures upon which the child's 

 imagination can weave and drape its fancies; and the doll, 

 whether as some believe a direct descendant of the old-time fetich 

 or not, is certainly related to it psychologically. The real and 

 the ideal, the world of fact and the world of fiction, are divided in 

 the mind of savage and of child by no definite boundaries, and 

 are constantly confused. 



We may linger a moment longer in our comparison of the 

 childhood of the race and of the individual, to notice the possi- 



