54 ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 



woman play the largest part ; and so it is in the 

 religious and social institutions of primitive man. To 

 the child, singing and dancing are the natural expres- 

 sions of the emotions ; in him mot her- worship, animism, 

 and food -cult are strongly developed. The animals, 

 again, are to the child at once beings full of mysterious 

 power, and yet equals and intimates in a degree never 

 again approached during life. In all these respects the 

 true parallels to the child are the men and women of 

 early civilisation. I have never yet found a healthy 

 normal child who felt difficulty about the talking of 

 cats, the provision of hearty meals daintily laid by 

 goats, or the advice and warning given by birds to 

 friendly mortals. It takes all these things as seriously 

 and as unhesitatingly as the Eoman took the cackling 

 of his sacred geese, or primitive man takes the animal 

 lore and totemism of his tribe. The psychologist, who 

 will watch the reception of Marclien by children, will 

 learn much of the manner in which Marclien have been 

 developed among primitive men ; but he will learn 

 something more : he will grasp how much of the 

 customs and feelings of Mdrchenland are merely reflexes 

 of a long past stage of social development of the child- 

 hood of human culture. Let us try and interpret some 

 of the fundamental features of Mdrchenland, so real to 

 the child, so unreal to his elder. 



In the first place, the great bulk of the population 

 we have to deal with leads a country life. We may be 

 taken into a village, but rarely, if ever, into a town. 

 We have to deal with peasants and with hunters, with 

 men and women of the fields and of the forests. We 



