The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 9

and
hardly yet has the mother of the "father of his country" received the just
remembrance and recognition belonging to her who bore so noble and
so illustrious a son. By and by, however, it is to be hoped, we shall be
free from the reproach cast upon us by Colonel Higginson, and wake up
to the full consciousness that the great men of our land have had
mothers, and proceed to re-write our biographical dictionaries and

encyclopædias of life-history.
In Latin _mater,_ as does mother with us, possessed a wide extent of
meaning, "mother, parent, producer, nurse, preparer, cause, origin,
source," etc. _Mater omnium artium necessitas,_ "Necessity is the
mother of invention," and similar phrases were in common use, as they
are also in the languages of to-day. Connected with mater is _materia,_
"matter,"--_mother_-stuff, perhaps,--and from it is derived
_matrimonium,_ which testifies concerning primitive Roman sociology,
in which the mother-idea must have been prominent, something we
cannot say of our word _marriage,_ derived ultimately from the Latin
_mas,_ "a male."
Westermarck notes the Nicaraguans, Dyaks, Minahassers, Andaman
Islanders, Pádam, Munda Kols, Santals, Moors of the Western Soudan,
Tuaregs, Teda, among the more or less primitive peoples with whom
woman is held in considerable respect, and sometimes, as among the
Munda Kols, bears the proud title "mistress of the house" (166. 500,
501). As Havelock Ellis remarks, women have shown themselves the
equals of men as rulers, and most beneficial results have flowed from
their exercise of the great political wisdom, and adaptation to statecraft
which seems to belong especially to the female sex. The household has
been a training-school for women in the more extended spheres of
human administrative society.
_Alma Mater._
The college graduate fondly calls the institution from which he has
obtained his degree Alma Mater, "nourishing, fostering, cherishing
mother," and he is her alumnus (foster-child, nourished one). For long
years the family of the benign and gracious mother, whose wisdom was
lavished upon her children, consisted of sons alone, but now, with the
advent of "sweeter manners, purer laws," daughters have come to her
also, and the alumnae, "the sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair,"
share in the best gifts their parent can bestow. To Earth also, the term
Alma Mater has been applied, and the great nourishing mother of all
was indeed the first teacher of man, the first university of the race.

_Alma, alumnus, alumna_, are all derived from alo, "I nourish,
support." From the radical al, following various trains of thought, have
come: alesco, "I grow up"; coalesco, "I grow together"; adolesco, "I
grow up,"--whence adolescent, etc.; obsolesco, "I wear out"; alimentum,
"food"; alimonium, "support"; _altor, altrix_, "nourisher"; altus, "high,
deep" (literally, "grown"); elementum, "first principle," etc. Connected
With adolesco is adultus, whence our adult, with the radical of which
the English word old (_eld_) is cognate. From the root al, "to grow, to
make to grow, to nourish," spring also the Latin words _prôles_,
"offspring," suboles, "offspring, sprout," _indôles_, "inborn or native
quality."
_"Mother's Son."_
The familiar expression "every mother's son of us" finds kin in the
Modern High German _Muttersohn, Mutterkind_, which, with the even
more significant Muttermensch (human being), takes us back to the
days of "mother-right." Rather different, however, is the idea called up
by the corresponding Middle Low German modersone, which means
"bastard, illegitimate child."
Lore of Motherhood A synonym of Muttermensch is Mutterseele, for
soul and man once meant pretty much, the same. The curious
expression mutterseelenallein, "quite alone; alone by one's self," is
given a peculiar interpretation by Lippert, who sees in it a relic of the
burial of the dead (soul) beneath the hearth, threshold, or floor of the
house; "wessen Mutter im Hause ruht, der kann daheim immer nur mit
seiner Mutterseele selbander allein sein." Or, perhaps, it goes back to
the time when, as with the Seminoles of Florida, the babe was held
over the mouth of the mother, whose death resulted from its birth, in
order that her departing spirit might enter the new being.
In German, the "mother-feeling" makes its influence felt in the
nomenclature of the lower brute creation. As contrasted with our
English female donkey (she-donkey), mare, ewe, ewe-lamb, sow,
doe-hare (female hare), queen-bee, etc., we find Mutteresel,
"mother-donkey "; Mutterpferd, "mother-horse"; Mutterschaf,
"mother-sheep"; Mutterlamm, "mother lamb"; Mutterschwein, "mother

swine"; Mutterhase, "mother-hare"; Mutterbiene, "mother-bee."
Nor is this feeling absent from the names of plants and things inanimate.
We have Mutterbirke, "birch"; Mutterblume, "seed-flower";
Mutternelke, "carnation"; Mutternagelein (our "mother-clove");
Mutterholz. In English we have "mother of thyme," etc. In Japan a
triple arrangement in the display of the flower-vase--a floral trinity--is
termed chichi, "father"; haha, "mother"; ten, "heaven" (189. 74).
In the nursery-lore of all peoples, as we can see from the fairy-tales and
child-stories in our own and other languages, this attribution