changed and he is easily diverted, from one extreme to another. With him the 'fount of joy 

 lies very near the lake of tears. ' As has been pointed out the child is hopeful and confident, 

 but still subject to vague and unreasonable fears. He has a great admiration tor physical skill 

 or power and but little appreciation of intellectual strength. His classic heroes are David, 

 Ulysses, Siegfried and Arthur, rather than Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. The Diety he pictures 

 as a giant. He assigns a personality to inanimate things. Objects that bring to him pain 

 must be scolded or punished, as a stone over which he falls. The doll is often alive to the 

 imagination of the little girl, and never in after life will sorrow be any more real than when 

 her savage brother crushes its head. The child readily and gladly believes in the supernatural, 

 is superstitious and a fetish-worshiper. His world is peopled with brownies, fairies and 

 goblins. He believes in luck and chance. All those who have lived for any length of time 

 with savage peoples have been impressed with the similarity between them and children. 



D. Persistent Savage Traits. From this low stage of culture, as a result of heredity 

 and through the operation of the home, school, church, state and society, the individual passes 

 to a higher plane of culture and gradually attains those physical, emotional, intellectual, ethical 

 and religious traits that characterize the civilized adult. Eliminate the influence of the above 

 social institutions and the individual makes but little progress. In spite of their influence 

 every person retains many reminiscences of the primitive life of tree-climbing and hunting man, 

 suggesting that only a relatively short time has elapsed since civilized man attained the higher 

 plane of culture and explaining why some individuals have succeeded in acquiring only such a 

 very thin veneering, 



1. TREE-CUMBING ATAVISMS. Amongst civilized adults are still found, more or less 

 frequently, peculiarities of the skeleton which were characteristic of climbing man. The stand- 

 ing position, as Drummond points out, is difficult for man to retain for any considerable length 

 of time. The sneer seems to be what remains of early man's display of his formidable canine 

 teeth. When our eyes become weakened, or diseased, green bandages, eye shades and lamp 

 shades are prescribed. Many adults show a fondness for swings, hammocks, and rocking- 

 chairs. Two of the most deep-seated fears with civilized man are the fear of falling from a 

 height and the fear of snakes. Many people are instinctively and unreasonably afraid of the 

 dark, thunder and lightning and high wind. 



2. HUNTING AND FISHING ATAVISMS. The love for hunting and fishing has still a deep 

 hold upon many, in which the instinct to kill has not been replaced with a love and sympathy 

 for animal life. This instinct is partially satisfied by shooting at a target or "clay pigeons." 

 The gathering of nuts and wild berries from the fields and forests furnishes a tamer and milder 

 pleasure that one does not get when ordered from the grocer. Fortunately but few have lost 

 the charm of the woods, fields, streams, lakes and mountains. The nomadic instinct is still 

 strong in many and they constitute our "globe-trotters." Very few people there are who are 

 not affected more or less by absurd superstitions. The readiness with which a mob will drop 

 back into savagery and indulge in the most revolting cruelty to their fellow-man furnishes 

 evidence of the thinness of the veneering that we call civilization. There is no crime that man 

 or woman commits against society that may not be looked upon as a form of savage atavism. 

 The most satisfactory theory of the criminal is that he is an individual who insists upon 

 practicing to-day the code of ethics that was developed and recognized when the race was in 

 its youth. 



The instinctive clenching of the fist in anger, the setting of the jaws, the stamping of the 

 foot and the rapid heart beat, even when the cause of anger is not present, are readily under- 

 stood. The interest which so many of the lower and middle classes manifest in personal 

 encounters, prize-fights, wrestling-matches, and the corresponding contests of animals, are 

 simply so much savage atavism left in their natures, The throwing of a hammer to the 

 ground, with which one has struck his finger, is an ineffectual attempt to punish an inanimate 

 object. The kicking of loose objects upon the walk, the carrying of a cane, various sleeping 

 postures, the fondness for rhythm in music and poetry, the use of gesture, the taste for gaudy 

 color and powerful perfumes, are all explainable upon the theory that every individual must 

 recapitulate the race history. For the great majority of people a camp-fire at night has a 

 strange, undefinable attraction, which is less in the case of the old fire-place and grate, but 

 still recognizable. As you watch the weird tongues of flame licking the embers, if you shut 

 out all other sounds and listen intently you may hear reverberating through the misty cor- 

 ' lors of memory the "Call of the wild." 



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