304 P8T0H0L0GY. 



girl ; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in 

 a hammock, and talked to it all day long — there was no 

 part in life which the cucumber did not play. Says Mr. 

 Tylor : 



' ' An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a sol- 

 dier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disap- 

 pears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the 

 sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a 

 ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved 

 about, . . . and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to 

 arrange and develop its ideas. ... Of how much use . . . may be 

 seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play with. . . . 

 In later years and among highly educated j>eop]e the mental process 

 which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and horses, 

 though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phe- 

 nomena. Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the effect 

 of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon 

 a grown reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite . . . 

 yet what reality is given to the scene by a good picture. . . . Mr. Back- 

 house Qne day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman arranging 

 several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and 

 marked in various directions with black and red lines. These, he 

 learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood 

 for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the name of 

 Mother Brown. Similar practices are found among far higher races 

 than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes a 

 mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by 

 filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about 

 with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the 

 cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would 

 have done if the dead body had been still alive within it. Here we have 

 an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the child, kept 

 as a memorial. . . . Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who had lost 

 an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it."* 



To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones 

 seem to be fetishes. They, it is true, resemble ; but the 

 fact that the mere materiality of the reminder is almost as 

 important as its resemblance is shown by the popularity a 

 hundred years ago of the black taffeta * silhouettes ' Avhich 

 are still found among family relics, and of one of which 

 Fichte could write to his affianced : ' Die Farhe fehlt, das 

 Augefehlt, es fehlt d:^r Jiimmlische Ausdruck deiner lieblichen 



* Early Hist, of Mankind, p. 108. 



