Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/760

738 made honey, he observed pertinently enough from his teleological standpoint, "Then do they bring it for us to eat?"

The idea underlying this questioning as to uses is the same idea which the theological optimists of the last century were wont to drive to such a surprising length. Their amusing speculations showed how far from easy it Is to apply the idea to particular cases, and our small philosopher evidently saw the difficulty in the case of the bees, not by any means one of the most difficult.

A child's question may be prompted merely by ignorance and curiosity, or by a deeper motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery, or contradiction. It is not always easy to distinguish the two types of question, yet in many cases at least its form, and the manner of putting, it will tell us that it issues from a puzzled and temporarily baffled brain. As long as the questioning goes on briskly, we may infer that a child believes in the possibility of knowledge, and does not know the deepest depths of intellectual despair. More pathetic than the saddest of questions is the silencing of questions by the loss of faith.

It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled with much which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions to the rule don't trouble the grown-up persons, just because as recurrent exceptions they seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus adults, though quite unversed in hydrostatics, would be incapable of being puzzled by C's problem, why my putting my hand in

water does not make a hole in it. Similarly, though they know nothing of animal physiology, they are never troubled by the mystery of fish breathing under water, which when first noted by a child may come as a sort of shock. The little boy just referred to, in his far-reaching zoölogical interogatory asked his mother, "Can they (the fish) breathe with their moufsmouths [sic] under water?"

In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from others, the child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. The same boy was much exercised about the sea and where it went to. He expressed a wish to take off his shoes and to walk out into the sea so as to see where the ships go to, and was much troubled on learning that the sea got deeper and deeper and that if he walked out into it he would be drowned. At first he denied the paradox (which he at once saw) of the incoming sea going uphill. "But, mamma, it doesn't run up, it doesn't run up, so it couldn't come up over our heads?" He was told that this was so, and he wisely began to try to accommodate his mind to this startling revelation. C, too, was much exercised by this problem of the moving mass of waters, wanting to know whether it came halfway up the world. Probably in both these cases the idea of water rising had its uncanny, alarming aspect.

We have seen that the disappearance of a thing is at a very