Read Ebook: The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day by Chamberlain Alexander Francis

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INDEX TO PROVERBS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION A OF BIBLIOGRAPHY

SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION B OF BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHILD-STUDY.

It was an Oriental poet who sang:--

"On parent knees, a naked, new-born child, Weeping thou sat'st, while all around thee smiled; So live, that, sinking in thy last, long sleep, Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep,"

Vast indeed is now the province of him who studies the child. In Somatology,--the science of the physical characteristics and constitution of the body and its members,--he seeks not alone to observe the state and condition of the skeleton and its integuments during life, but also to ascertain their nature and character in the period of prenatal existence, as well as when causes natural, or unnatural, disease, the exhaustion of old age, violence, or the like, have induced the dissolution of death.

In Linguistics and Philology, he endeavours to discover the essence and import of those manifold, inarticulate, or unintelligible sounds, which, with the long flight of time, develop into the splendidly rounded periods of a Webster or a Gladstone, or swell nobly in the rhythmic beauties of a Swinburne or a Tennyson.

In Art and Technology, he would fain fathom the depths of those rude scribblings and quaint efforts at delineation, whence, in the course of ages, have been evolved the wonders of the alphabet and the marvellous creations of a Rubens and an Angelo.

In Psychology, he seeks to trace, in childish prattlings and lore of the nursery, the far-off beginnings of mythology, philosophy, religion. Beside the stories told to children in explanation of the birth of a sister or a brother, and the children's own imaginings concerning the little new-comer, he may place the speculations of sages and theologians of all races and 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.

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."

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 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 CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER.

Interesting is the following statement of Mr. Codrington, the well-known missionary to the Melanesians:--

Since the appearance of Bachofen's famous book on the matriarchate, "mother-right," that system of society in which the mother is paramount in the family and the line of inheritance passes through her, has received much attention from students of sociology and primitive history.

Post thus defines the system of mother-right:--

"The matriarchate is a system of relationship according to which the child is related only to his mother and to the persons connected with him through the female line, while he is looked upon as not related to his father and the persons connected with him through the male line. According to this system, therefore, the narrowest family circle consists not, as with us to-day, of father, mother, and child, but of mother, mother's brother, and sister's child, whilst the father is completely wanting, and the mother's brother takes the father's place with the sister's children. The real father is not the father of his own children, but of his nephews and nieces, whilst the brother of his wife is looked upon as father to his children. The brothers and sisters of the mother form with her a social group, to which belong also the children of the sisters, the children of the daughters of the sisters, etc., but not the children of the brothers, the children of the sisters' sons, etc. With every husband the relationship ceases" .

The system of mother-right prevails widely over the whole globe; in some places, however, only in fragmentary condition. It is found amongst nearly all the native tribes of America; the peoples of Malaysia, Melanesia, Australia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the Dravidian tribes of India; in Africa it is found in the eastern Sahara, the Soudan, the east and west coast, and in the centre of the continent, but not to the exclusion, altogether, of father-right, while in the north the intrusion of Europeans and the followers of Islam has tended to suppress it. Traces of its former existence are discovered among certain of the ancient tribes of Asia Minor, the old Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, the Aryans of India, the Chinese, Japanese, etc.

Mother-right has been recognized by many sociologists as a system of family relationship, perhaps the most widespread, perhaps the most primitive of all. Dr. Brinton says:--

"The foundation of the gentile system, as of any other family life, is ... the mutual affection between kindred. In the primitive period this is especially between children of the same mother, not so much because of the doubt of paternity, as because physiologically and obviously, it is the mother in whom is formed, and from whom alone proceeds, the living being" .

Professor O. T. Mason, in the course of his interesting address on "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," remarks :--

The view of Apollo, which, in the council of the gods, influenced Athene to decide for Orestes, is this:--

Among the Choctaw-Muskogee tribes, women-chiefs were also known; the Yuchis, Chetimachas, had "Queens"; occasionally we find female rulers elsewhere in America, as among the Winnebagos, the Nah-ane, etc. Scattered examples of gynocracy are to be found in other parts of the world, and in their later development some of the Aryan races have been rather partial to women as monarchs, and striking instances of a like predilection are to be met with among the Semitic tribes,--Boadicea, Dido, Semiramis, Deborah are well-known cases in point, to say nothing of the Christian era and its more enlightened treatment of woman.

In the ancient Hebrew chronicles we find mention of Deborah, that "mother in Israel."

Westermarck notes the Nicaraguans, Dyaks, Minahassers, Andaman Islanders, P?dam, 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" . 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.

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 of motherhood to all things animate and inanimate is common, as it is in the folk-lore and mythology of the adult members of primitive races now existing.

The arts of poetry, music, dancing, according to classic mythology, were presided over by nine goddesses, or Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, "Muse-mother," as Mrs. Browning terms her. The history of woman as a poet has yet to be written, but to her in the early ages poetry owed much of its development and its beauty. Mr. Vance has remarked that "among many of the lowest races the only love-dances in vogue are those performed by the women" . And Letourneau considers that "there are good grounds for supposing that women may have especially participated in the creation of the lyric of the erotic kind." Professor Mason, in the course of his remarks upon woman's labour in the world in all ages, says :--

To the mother beside the cradle where lies her tender offspring, song is as natural as speech itself to man. Lullabies are found in every land; everywhere the joyous mother-heart bursts forth into song. The German proverb is significant: "Wer ein saugendes Kind hat, der hat eine singende Frau," and Fischer, a quaint poet of the sixteenth century, has beautifully expressed a like idea:--

"Wo Honig ist, da sammlen sieb die Fliegen, Wo Kinder sind, da singt man um die Wiegen."

Ploss, in whose book is to be found a choice collection of lullabies from all over the globe, remarks: "The folk-poetry of all peoples is rich in songs whose texts and melodies the tender mother herself imagined and composed" .

"Vom Vater hab'ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes F?hren; Vom M?tterchen die Frobnatur, Und Lust zu fabulieren."

Among the Teton Indians, according to the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, the following peculiar custom exists: "Prior to the naming of the infant is the ceremony of the transfer of character; should the infant be a boy, a brave and good-tempered man, chosen beforehand, takes the infant in his arms and breathes into his mouth, thereby communicating his own disposition to the infant, who will grow up to be a brave and good-natured man. It is thought that such an infant will not cry as much as infants that have not been thus favoured. Should the infant be a girl, it is put into the arms of a good woman, who breathes into its mouth" .

"There is a sight all hearts beguiling-- A youthful mother to her infant smiling, Who, with spread arms and dancing feet, And cooing voice, returns its answer sweet,"

and mothers alone have understood the first babblings of humanity, they have waited long to be remembered in the worthiest name of the language they have taught their offspring.

"The language I have learned these forty years now must I forego."

"Praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue."

"Min Modersprak, so slicht un recht, Du ole frame Red! Wenn blot en Mund 'min Vader' seggt, So klingt mi't as en Bed,"

"Vaderhus un Modersprak! Lat mi't n?m'n un lat mi't rop'n; Vaderhus, du belli Sted, Modersprak, da frame Red, Sch?nres klingt der Nix tohopen,"

As we say in English most commonly "native city," so also we say "native land." Even Byron sings:--

"Adieu, adieu I my native shore Fades o'er the waters blue;

My native land--good night!"

and Fitz-Greene Halleck, in his patriotic poem "Marco Bozzaris," bids strike "For God, and your native land."

Scott's far-famed lines:--

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