The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 3

of all ages concerning birth, death, immortality, and the
future life, which, growing with the centuries, have ripened into the
rich and wholesome dogmas of the church.
Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of men, its
searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by
the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from
helpless infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying
development of manhood to the idiosyncrasies of disease and
senescence, we have an epitome in miniature of the life of the race; that
in primitive tribes, and in those members of our civilized communities,
whose growth upward and onward has been retarded by inherited
tendencies which it has been out of their power to overcome, or by a
milieu and environment, the control and subjugation of which required
faculties and abilities they did not possess, we see, as it were, ethnic
children; that in the nursery, the asylum, the jail, the mountain
fastnesses of earth, or the desert plains, peopled by races whose ways
are not our ways, whose criteria of culture are far below ours, we have
a panorama of what has transpired since, alone and face to face with a
new existence, the first human beings partook of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge and became conscious of the great gulf, which, after
millenniums of struggle and fierce competition, had opened between
the new, intelligent, speaking anthropoids and their fellows who
straggled so far behind.
Wordsworth has said: "The child is father of the man," and a German
writer has expanded the same thought:--
"Die Kindheit von heute Ist die Menschheit von morgen, Die Kindheit
von heute Ist die Menschheit von gestern." ["The childhood of to-day Is
the manhood of to-morrow, The childhood of to-day Is the manhood of
yesterday."]

In brief, the child is father of the man and brother of the race.
In all ages, and with every people, the arcana of life and death, the
mysteries of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maidenhood,
womanhood, manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the
profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these
strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East,
with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same
thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before the devotees of Moloch and
Cybele, when Carthage sent her innocent boys to the furnace, a
sacrifice to the king of gods, and Asia Minor offered up the virginity of
her fairest daughters to the first-comer at the altars of the earth-mother.
Purified and ennobled by long centuries of development and unfolding,
the blossoming of such conceptions is seen in the great sacrifice which
the Son of Man made for the children of men, and in the cardinal
doctrine of the religion which he founded,--"Ye must be born
again,"--the regeneration, which alone gave entrance into Paradise.
The Golden Age of the past of which, through the long lapse of years,
dreamers have dreamt and poets sung, and the Golden City, glimpses of
whose glorious portal have flashed through the prayers and meditations
of the rapt enthusiast, seem but one in their foundation, as the Eden of
the world's beginning and the heaven that shall open to men's eyes,
when time shall be no more, are but closely allied phases, nay, but one
and the same phase, rather, of the world-old thought,--the ethnic might
have been, the ought to be of all the ages. The imagined, retrospect
childhood of the past is twin-born with the ideal, prospective childhood
of the world to come. Here the savage and the philosopher, the child
and the genius, meet; the wisdom of the first and of the last century of
human existence is at one. Childhood is the mirror in which these
reflections are cast,--the childhood of the race is depicted with the same
colours as the childhood of the individual. We can read a larger thought
into the words of Hartley Coleridge:--
"Oh what a wilderness were this sad world, If man were always man,
and never child."
Besides the anthropometric and psycho-physical investigations of the

child carried on in the scientific laboratory with exact instruments and
unexceptionable methods, there is another field of "Child-Study" well
worthy our attention for the light it can shed upon some of the dark
places in the wide expanse of pedagogical science and the art of
education.
Its laboratory of research has been the whole wide world, the
experimenters and recorders the primitive peoples of all races and all
centuries,--fathers and mothers whom the wonderland of parenthood
encompassed and entranced; the subjects, the children of all the
generations of mankind.
The consideration of "The Child in Folk-Thought,"--what tribe upon
tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned
from, taught to, the