THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 73 



ency is at work in the widespread lingual habit of naming things after 

 parts of the body, as in the case of " door," called the " eye of the 

 house " by the native of Banks' Island; of " son-tree," the term ap- 

 plied by the Siamese to " fruit " ; of the Malay's use of the noun 

 "child" for "lock"; of "house-belly," the African Mandingo's 

 equivalent for " in the house "; and of " hair," often used for " leaf " 

 or " feather " in many Melanesian languages.* In more modern 

 forms of speech the process is suggested by such expressions as the 

 head of a bridge, the eye of a needle, the mouth of a river, the neck 

 of an estuary, the trunk and arms of a tree, the lungs of a bellows, 

 the bones of an umbrella, the nose of a promontory, the ears of a 

 book, the fingers of a clock, the legs of a table, the veins of marble, the 

 foot of a mountain. Then there are analogies based on the activities 

 of the human body, for when we describe things as standing, sitting, 

 or lying; as rising, falling, running, or climbing when we use 

 expressions like " striking clock," " dancing light," " sleeping lake," 

 " yawning precipice," " laughing skies," " babbling brooks," " raging 

 billows," we are applying to the objects named terms originally used 

 to describe our own acts. The sense of hearing, again, is utilized 

 in such expressions as taube Nuss (" with nothing in the shell ") and 

 taube Kohlen (" those which have burned out "). So the defect of 

 blindness is objectified in the ccecum vallum of Roman speech, in 

 ciego, said in Spanish of cheese that " has no eyes," and in the Hinder 

 Schuss of the Germans, whose more familiar Augenblick everybody 

 recalls. Not less suggestive are the numerous expressions which pro- 

 ject conceptions of life and death into the environment, such as the 

 caput mortuum (tete morte) of chemistry, eau vive (Quellivasser), 

 " dead water " (turn of the tide), todte Farbe and lelhafte Farbe, vivus 

 lapis (firestone), " quicksand " and " quicksilver," the " dead of 

 night," " dead weight," a " dead level," and todtes Kapital. Nor 

 must we forget that the reading of vitality into inorganic objects, 

 common enough among savages, has by no means disappeared from 

 civilized races. Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries have shown that out of 

 forty-eight children just attaining school age, twenty believed the 

 moon and stars to be alive, fifteen thought a doll and sixteen thought 

 flowers would suffer pain if burned. One pupil described the 

 crescent moon as " half stuck " or " half buttoned " into the sky; the 

 spluttering of coals in a fire was called " barking " by a girl four 

 years and a half old. Miss Ingelow says that when over two years 

 old, and for about a year after, she had the habit of attributing in- 

 telligence not only to all living creatures, but even to stones and manu- 

 factured articles. 



This projection of words originally descriptive of the human body 



* Codrington. The Melanesian Languages. 



