No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. Ill 



are perhaps even more companionable than parents or play- 

 mates ; love, hate, fear, feel revenge, are good or naughty, 

 quick or stupid to learn or understand, tired like the doll when 

 the child is tired, eat, sleep and walk like and sometimes with 

 their little human owners or companions, love to be dressed, 

 to be carried to ride, to have their toilets carefully made, to 

 be decorated with ornaments, etc. Indeed, we might almost 

 define the animal world as consisting of human qualities 

 broken up and widely scattered throughout nature, and 

 having their highest utility in teaching the child psychology 

 by a true pedagogical method. The pig, to a child who knows 

 its habits and what piggishness means, is a symbol of impet- 

 uous greed and gross selfishness not only in eating, but also 

 in other matters of filth and untidiness, which gives the child 

 with this familiarity a better conception and a truer reaction 

 to all that these qualities mean in the world of man. To say, 

 of a woman, She is a butterfly or a peacock, describes traits 

 which it would take a whole chapter to explain to one who 

 was not familiar with these forms of animal life. In the 

 same way, the goose, the fox, the eel, the lion, bulls and 

 bears, the eagle, the dove, the jay, the cuckoo, the hawk, 

 the pelican, the crow, the serpent, the gazelle, the cormorant, 

 the badger, wolf, tiger, elephant, alligator, fish, chrysalis and 

 its metamorphoses, the bee, ant, wasp, the sloth, insects, the 

 ape, hibernation, migration, nest-building and scores of others 

 are psychological categories or qualities, embodied and exag- 

 gerated so that we see them writ large and taught object-lesson- 

 wise to those who live at a stage when character is being 

 moulded and influenced pro or con in each of these directions. 

 We might add a long list of more or less mythic animals 

 or popular misconceptions of animal traits. The leviathan, 

 the phoenix, the albatross, the tadpole, the frog, the centaur, 

 the children's fancy in creating impossible new animals, is 

 almost as fecund as nature herself. Therefore we plead for 

 menageries, for collections of animals in every public park, 

 pets, a familiarity with stables, school museums of stuffed 

 specimens, the flora and fauna of the neighborhood in every 

 school-house, to say nothing of instruction in every school 

 concerning insects, birds and animals which are noxious, and 

 those which are helpful to vegetation, fruit and agriculture 



