THE PROBLEMS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 47 



bility of tracing similarities between the spontaneous attempts of 

 children to imitate the social conditions under which their elders 

 live, and the actual history of social and political institutions. 

 Two striking illustrations of this have been recorded. Dr. Stan- 

 ley Hall has described the evolution of a sand-pile into a farming 

 community, under the promptings of the organizing play instinct 

 of some New England boys. Farms, roads, houses, barns, men, 

 women, cattle, tools, and so on, were fashioned, and in their growth 

 we find mimicked the evolution of human industry, the problems 

 of social life, the distribution of wealth, the invention of money, 

 the fluctuation of prices, the tendencies that make the monopolist 

 and the socialist. And yet it is distinctly play ; the wooden farm- 

 ers of the community being not unlike dolls, though possessing a 

 personality with curiously real relations to the boys themselves. 

 A more valuable illustration, because less of play and more of 

 reality, is shown by the governmental and social regulations of 

 the boys of the McDonough School near Baltimore, the descrip- 

 tion of which we owe to Mr. John Johnson. These boys roamed 

 over eight hundred acres of land full of objects arousing a boy's 

 desires and curiosity, such as birds' eggs and nests, rabbits, and 

 nuts of all kinds. From an original common ownership in the 

 land a few boys, by extra exertion and improvements, gained 

 privileges over certain portions of it ; and step by step as the 

 number of boys increased, and the desirability of various bits of 

 land was more clearly recognized, unwritten laws grew up, ju- 

 dicial procedure was inaugurated, testamentary power granted ; 

 money, which took the form of " butter " and school credits, intro- 

 duced ; and the intricacies of speculation, fluctuation of values, 

 attempts at the redistribution of the soil, conservatism and liberal- 

 ism gradually appeared as problems, and were solved in some sat- 

 isfactory way. These and other phases of social and political 

 movements had as intense a reality as in actual life, and in them 

 Mr. Johnson finds many and striking analogies to the history of 

 social and political institutions. 



One further aspect of our train of thought deserves a moment's 

 consideration, and this is the analogy between primitive mental 

 traits and those appearing in the decay of mind, in arrested men- 

 tal development, in hypnotism, and in other somewhat unusual 

 and morbid psychic conditions. In the waning of mental powers 

 we observe a remarkable law, by which the latest, least firm ac- 

 quisitions are first lost, and the older, more deeply impressed, more 

 primitive manifestations are longest retained. We thus possess 

 an additional method of corroborating the various deductions 

 above drawn, and in a sense truer than at first appears we have a 

 " second childhood " the inverse of the first. To give a single in- 

 stance where a detailed study would alone do justice, many of the 



