gaunt and hungry children of a woman who had not wherewithal to feed her numerous progeny, and so they were turned into ravening beasts of prey; in another the raven and the loon were children, whom their father sought to paint, and the loon's spots are evidence of the attempt to this day; in a third the sea-pigeons or guillemots are children who were changed into these birds for having scared away some seals. The prettiest story, however, is that of the origin of the swallows: Once there were some children who were wonderfully wise, so wise indeed that they came to be called zulugagnak, "like the raven," a bird that knows the past and the future. One day they were playing on the edge of a cliff near the village, and building toy-houses, when they were changed into birds. They did not forget their childish occupation, however, and, even to this day, the swallows come to the cliff to build their nests or houses of mud, -"even the raven does not molest them, and Eskimo children love to watch them" (544. 262, 263). From time immemorial have the life and actions. of the brute creation been associated with the first steps of education and learning in the child.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHILD-LIFE AND EDUCATION IN GENERAL.

The mother's heart is the child's school-room. - Henry Ward Beecher.
The father is known from the child. - German Proverb.

Learn young, learn fair,

Learn auld, learn mair. - Scotch Proverb.

We bend the tree when it is young. - Bulgarian Proverb.

Fools and bairns should na see things half done.-Scotch Proverb.
No one is born master. - Italian Proverb.

Mother as Teacher.

Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu is a favourite dictum of philosophy; primitive peoples might, perhaps, be credited with a somewhat different crystallization of thought: nihil est in puero quod non prius in parenti, "nothing is in the child which was not before in the parent," for belief in prenatal influence of parent upon child is widely prevalent. The following remarks, which were written of the semi-civilized peoples of Annam and Tonquin, may stand, with suitable change of terms, for very many barbarous and savage races:

She

"The education of the children begins even before they come into the world. The prospective mother is at once submitted to a kind of material and moral régime sanctioned by custom. Gross viands are removed from her table, and her slightest movements are regarded that they may be regular and majestic. is expected to listen to the reading of good authors, to music and moral chants, and to attend learned societies, in order that she may fortify her mind by amusements of an elevated character. And she endeavours, by such discipline, to assure to the child.

whom she is about to bring into the world, intelligence, docility, and fitness for the duties imposed by social life" (518. XXXI. 629).

Among primitive peoples these ceremonies, dietings, doctorings, tabooings, number legion, as may be read in Ploss and Zmigrodzki.

The influence of the mother upon her child, beginning long before birth, continued in some parts of the world until long after puberty. The Spartan mothers even preserved "a power over their sons when arrived at manhood," and at the puberty-dance, by which the Australian leaves childhood behind to enter upon man's estate, his significant cry is: "My mother sees me no more!" (398. 153). Among the Chinese, "at the ceremony of going out of childhood, the passage from boyhood into manhood, the goddess of children Mother,' ceases to have the superintendence of the boy or girl, and the individual comes under the government of the gods in general."

6

That women are teachers born, even the most uncultured of human races have not failed to recognize, and the folk-faith in their ministrations is world-wide and world-old; for, as Mrs. Browning tells us :—

"Women know

The way to rear up children (to be just);
They know a simple, merry, tender knack

Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,

And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles."

Intellectually, as well as physically,

as the etymology of the name seems to indicate, the mother is the "former" of her child. As Henry Ward Beecher has well said, "the mother's heart is the child's school-room." Well might the Egyptian mother-goddess say (167. 261): "I am the mother who shaped thy beauties, who suckled thee with milk; I give thee with my milk festal things, that penetrate thy limbs with life, strength, and youth; I make thee to become the great ruler of Egypt, lord of the space which the sun circles round." In the land of the Pharaohs they knew in some dim fashion that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world."

The extensive rôle of the mother, as a teacher of the practical

arts of life, may be seen from the book of Professor Mason (113). Language, religion, the social arts, house-building, skin-dressing, weaving, spinning, animal-domestication, agriculture, are, with divers primitive peoples, since they have in great part originated with her, or been promoted chiefly by her efforts, left to woman as teacher and instructor, and well has the mother done her work all over the globe.

The function of the mother as priestess for woman has been the preserver, as, to so large an extent, she has been the creator, of religion has been exercised age after age, and among people after people. Henry Ward Beecher has said: "Every mother is a priestess ordained by God Himself," and Professor Mason enlarges the same thought: "Scarcely has the infant mind begun to think, ere this perpetual priestess lights the fires of reverence and keeps them ever burning, like a faithful vestal" (112. 12).

Though women and mothers have often been excluded from the public or the secret ceremonials and observations of religion, the household in primitive and in modern times has been the temple, of whose penetralia they alone have been the ministers.

Imitation.

Tarde, in his monograph on the "Laws of Imitation," has shown the great influence exerted among peoples of all races, of all grades and forms of culture, by imitation, conscious or unconscious, a factor of the highest importance even at the present day and among those communities of men most advanced and progressive. Speaking a little too broadly, perhaps, he says (541. 15):

--

"All the resemblances, of social origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms, — custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naïve or deliberate imitation. Hence the excellence of that modern method which explains doctrines or institutions by their history. This tendency can only be generalized. Great inventors and great geniuses do sometimes stumble upon the same thing together, but these coincidences are very rare. And when they do really occur, they always have their origin in a fund of common instruction upon which, independent of one

another, the two authors of the same invention have drawn; and this fund consists of a mass of traditions of the past, of experiments, rude or more or less arranged, and transmitted imitatively by language, the great vehicle of all imitations."

In her interesting article on "Imitation in Children," Miss Haskell observes: "That the imitative faculty is what makes the human being educable, that it is what has made progressive civilization possible, has always been known by philosophical educators. The energy of the child must pass from potentiality to actuality, and it does so by the path of imitation because this path offers the least resistance or the greatest attraction, or perhaps because there is no other road. Whatever new and striking things he sees in the movements or condition of objects about him, provided he already has the experience necessary to apperceive this particular thing, he imitates" (260. 31).

In the pedagogy of primitive peoples imitation has an extensive rôle to play. Of the Twana Indians, of the State of Washington, Rev. Mr. Eells observes: "Children are taught continually, from youth until grown, to mimic the occupations of their elders." They have games of ball, jumping and running races, and formerly "the boys played at shooting with bows and arrows at a mark, and with spears, throwing at a mark, with an equal number of children on each side, and sometimes the older ones joined in." Now, however, "the boys mimic their seniors in the noise and singing and gambling, but without the gambling." The girls play with dolls, and sometimes "the girls and boys both play in canoes, and stand on half of a small log, six feet long and a foot wide, and paddle around in the water with a small stick an inch in thickness; and, in fact, play at most things which they see their seniors do, both whites and Indians" (437. 90, 91).

Concerning the Seminoles of Florida, we are told: "The baby, well into the world, learns very quickly that he is to make his own way through it as best he may. His mother is prompt to nourish him, and solicitous in her care for him if he falls ill; but, as far as possible, she goes her own way and leaves the little fellow to go his." Very early in life the child learns to help and to imitate its elders. "No small amount," Mr. MacCauley tells us, "of the labour in a Seminole household is done by children, even as young as four years of age. They can stir the soup