The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 4

child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its
development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and
culture,--can bring to the harvest of pedagogy many a golden sheaf.
The works of Dr. Ploss, Das kleine Kind, Das Kind, and Das Weib,
encyclopædic in character as the two last are, covering a vast field of
research relating to the anatomy, physiology, hygiene, dietetics, and
ceremonial treatment of child and mother, of girl and boy, all over the
world, and forming a huge mine of information concerning child-birth,
motherhood, sex-phenomena, and the like, have still left some aspects
of the anthropology of childhood practically untouched. In English, the
child has, as yet, found no chronicler and historian such as Ploss. The
object of the present writer is to treat of the child from a point of view
hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit what the world owes to childhood
and the motherhood and the fatherhood which it occasions, to indicate
the position of the child in the march of civilization among the various
races of men, and to estimate the influence which the child-idea and its
accompaniments have had upon sociology, mythology, religion,
language; for the touch of the child is upon them all, and the debt of
humanity to the little children has not yet been told. They have figured
in the world's history and its folk-lore as magi and "medicine-men," as
priests and oracle-keepers, as physicians and healers, as teachers and
judges, as saints, heroes, discoverers, and inventors, as musicians and

poets, actors and labourers in many fields of human activity, have been
compared to the foolish and to the most wise, have been looked upon as
fetiches and as gods, as the fit sacrifice to offended Heaven, and as the
saviours and regenerators of mankind. The history of the child in
human society and of the human ideas and institutions which have
sprung from its consideration can have here only a beginning. This
book is written in full sympathy with the thought expressed in the
words of the Latin poet Juvenal: Maxima debetur pueris reverentia,
and in the declaration of Jean Paul: "I love God and every little child."

CHAPTER II.
THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER.
A good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.--English Proverb.
The first poet, the first priest, was the first mother. The first empire was
a woman and her children.--_O. T. Mason_.
When society, under the guidance of the "fathers of the church," went
almost to destruction in the dark ages, it was the "mothers of the
people" who saved it and set it going on the new right path.
--Zmigrodski (adapted).
The story of civilization is the story of the mother. --Zmigrodski.
One mother is more venerable than a thousand fathers. --Laws of Manu.
If the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the
world would kick the beam.--Lord Langdale.
Names of the Mother.
In A Song of Life,--a book in which the topic of sex is treated with such
delicate skill,--occurs this sentence: "The motherhood of mammalian
life is the most sacred thing in physical existence" (120. 92), and
Professor Drummond closes his Lowell Institute Lectures on the

Evolution of Man in the following words: "It is a fact to which too little
significance has been given, that the whole work of organic nature
culminates in the making of Mothers--that the animal series end with a
group which even the naturalist has been forced to call the Mammalia.
When the savage mother awoke to her first tenderness, a new creative
hand was at work in the world" (36. 240). Said Henry Ward Beecher:
"When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed with satisfaction,
and framed it quickly,--so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul,
power, and beauty, was the conception," and it was unto babes and
sucklings that this wisdom was first revealed. From their lips first fell
the sound which parents of later ages consecrated and preserved to all
time. With motherhood came into the world song, religion, the thought
of immortality itself; and the mother and the child, in the course of the
ages, invented and preserved most of the arts and the graces of human
life and human culture. In language, especially, the mother and the
child have exercised a vast influence. In the names for "mother," the
various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the
"fashioner" of the child, its "nourisher" and its "nurse." An examination
of the etymologies of the words for "mother" in all known languages is
obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of
the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How
primitive man--the first man of the race--called his mother, we can but
surmise. Still,