164 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
the period during which the human species has 
existed in any kind of civilisation, making its own 
conditions, is but a span compared with its long 
life of simple barbarism, it would be strange indeed 
if we did not find in the civilised child the 
psychological representative of primitive man. We 
do not look for the emotions and inherited or 
traditional habits proper to the adult. The higher 
mental faculties, which have had their growth in a 
developed social state, are latent in him. His 
senses and lower mental faculties are, on the con- 
trary, at their best: in the acuteness of his senses, 
and the vividness and durability of the impressions 
made on him by external stimuli; in his nearness 
to or oneness with Nature, resulting from his 
mythical faculty, and in the quick response of the 
organism to every outward change, he is like the 
animals. His world is small, but the bright mirror 
of his mind has reflected it so clearly, with all it 
contains, from sun and stars and floating clouds 
above, to the floating motes in the beam, and the 
grass blades and fine grains of yellow sand he 
treads upon, that he knows it as intimately as if 
he had existed in it for a thousand years. And 
whatever is rare and strange, or outside of Nature’s 
usual order, and opposed to his experience, affects 
him powerfully and excites the sense of mystery, 
which remains thereafter associated with the object. 
I remember that as a child, or small boy, I was 
affected in this way on seeing mushrooms growing 
in a chain of huge rings in a meadow; also by the 
