Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/762

740 old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: "When there is no egg, where does the hen come from? When there was no egg, I mean, where did the hen come from?" In a similar way as we saw in C's journal a child will puzzle his brains by asking how the first child was suckled, how the first chicken-pox was acquired, how the first man learned to speak (without any example).

The allied mystery of growth is also a frequent theme of this early questioning. "How" (asked one little three-year-old questioner) "does plants grow when we plant them? and how does boys grow from babies to big boys like me? Has I grown now while I was eating my supper? See!" and he stood up, to make the most of his stature. It would be funny to know all a child's speculations on this supremely interesting matter of growth. But of this more by and by.

Much of this questioning is metaphysical, in that it transcends the problems of every-day life and of science. The child is metaphysician in the sense in which the earliest human thinkers were metaphysicians, pushing his questioning into the inmost nature of things, and back to their absolute beginnings. He has no idea yet of the confines of human knowledge. If his mother tells him she does not know, he tenaciously clings to the idea that somebody knows—the doctor it may be, or the clergyman, or possibly the policeman, of whose superior knowledge one little girl was forcibly convinced by noting that her father once asked information of one of these willing officials.

Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener are some of the child's questions. The "why" is applied to everything in a most bewildering fashion. A little American girl, of nine years, after a pause in talk, recommenced the conversation by asking, "Why don't I think of something to say?" A play recently performed in a London theater made precisely this line of questioning a chief amusing feature in one of its comical characters. Another little American girl, aged three, one day left her play and her baby sister, named Edna Belle, to find her mother and ask, "Mamma, why isn't Edna Belle me, and why ain't I Edna Belle?" The narrator of this story adds that the child was not a daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of practical farmer folk. One can not be quite sure of the precise drift of this question. It may well have been the outcome of a new development of self-consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its distinctness from others. A question with a much clearer metaphysical ring about it, showing thought about the subtlest