Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-08-13
Continued from page 8

Learning speech is almost like taking
flight for the soul 1t is curious how
closely the babes defects in learning
to talk resemble those seen in disease
and old age, when speech is progressively
impaired. The long disputed question
VIII ether children invent new words is
now Overwhelmingly settled in the af-
| firmative, and we have lists of such
creations at two stages of life, one in
tender years, and another conscious
in the later teens. Vocabularies of the
nursery grow rather slowly, and many
of them have been collected during the
| first one, two or even three years of life
and tabulated. At first a single word
means a whole sentence, and there is
endless repetition, imitation of other
persons and of nature. Were the child
not brought up in the midst of ready
made tongue, without doubt it would
develop a new one.
| Play is the chief business of childhood
in its natural working state. We have
now at least twelve hundred distinct
plays of children, collected, described,
classified, and some writers have tried
to make an educational curriculum out
of them. Many of them that go on in
the nursery, kindergarten and school
yard are far older than history. They
were old when Nineveh was hamlet.
After endless discussion and many the
cries, we are now settling to the view that
most spontaneous plays are abridged
repetitions of the serious business of
primitive man, or perhaps the anthro-
poid creatures from which he sprang.
Contingent rimes are attenuated relics
of old religious rites of which almost
nothing else survives. Boys love to
hit a ball with a club, because their
forebears struck in their work, which
is usually rhythmic, or in hunting ami
mails. city youth goes to the country,
fishes all day, catching nothing, and
goes home happy, because he has, as it
were, heard from his remote ancestors
who were fishermen many thousand
years ago.
Play is the overflow of energy and in
dicates that there is superfuous force
in the system over and above what is
needed for vital processes, and SO is the
measure of the amount of work or study
that can be done without Jury to the
system later Like the scores of rudi-
lIlenLdIy organs III the DOQy InaL are
of no use to man. but by means of which
the student reads his title clear to an
animal origin of the human body, plays
are felted masses or echoing reverbera-
tions of the ancient life of humanity
in the body and soul.
We have now a score of careful minute
studies of the first fifteen to thirty
months of life, but from three to five
| there is a strange gap in Our knowledge.
The child's language and activities have
grown too complex to follow with COM
pleteness and detail. At the latter age,
however, when children can be studied
en- nasse in school, we have a vast body
of literature. Some have attempted
to inventory the contents of the mind
of the average child on entering school,
1t is amazing to see how little concern
ing the objects of nature the city child
knows. He often thinks meat is dug
from the ground, potatoes grow on trees,
cow is the size of the picture in his
book SiXty-two per cent. of those
into school hnI