740 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation 

 of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother : " "When there is no 

 egg, where does the hen come from ? When there was no egg, I 

 mean, where did the hen come from ? " In a similar way as we 



saw in C 's journal a child will puzzle his brains by asking how 



the first child was suckled, how the first chicken-pox was acquired, 

 how the first man learned to speak (without any example). 



The allied mystery of growth is also a frequent theme of this 

 early questioning. " How " (asked one little three-year-old ques- 

 tioner) " does plants grow when we plant them ? and how does 

 boys grow from babies to big boys like me ? Has I grown now 

 while I was eating my supper ? See ! " and he stood up, to make 

 the most of his stature. It would be funny to know all a child's 

 speculations on this supremely interesting matter of growth. 

 But of this more by and by. 



Much of this questioning is metaphysical, in that it transcends 

 the problems of every-day life and of science. The child is meta- 

 physician in the sense in which the earliest human thinkers were 

 metaphysicians, pushing his questioning into the inmost nature 

 of things, and back to their absolute beginnings. He has no idea 

 yet of the confines of human knowledge. If his mother tells him 

 she does not know, he tenaciously clings to the idea that some- 

 body knows the doctor it may be, or the clergyman, or possibly 

 the policeman, of whose superior knowledge one little girl was 

 forcibly convinced by noting that her father once asked informa- 

 tion of one of these willing officials. 



Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener are some 

 of the child's questions. The " why " is applied to everything in 

 a most bewildering fashion. A little American girl, of nine years, 

 after a pause in talk, recommenced the conversation by asking, 

 " Why don't I think of something to say ? " A play recently per- 

 formed in a London theater made precisely this line of question- 

 ing a chief amusing feature in one of its comical characters. An- 

 other little American girl, aged three, one day left her play and 

 her baby sister, named Edna Belle, to find her mother and ask, 

 " Mamma, why isn't Edna Belle me, and why ain't I Edna 

 Belle ? " * The narrator of this story adds that the child was not 

 a daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of practical farmer 

 folk. One can not be quite sure of the precise drift of this ques- 

 tion. It may well have been the outcome of a new development 

 of self -consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its dis- 

 tinctness from others. A question with a much clearer meta- 

 physical ring about it, showing thought about the subtlest prob- 



* Quoted from an article, Some Comments on Babies, by Miss Shinn, in the Overland 

 Monthly, January, 1894. 



