Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/458

442 flame; later on, for an empty glass with nothing in it. By another child it was extended to the ending of music, the closing of a drawer, and so on. Here, however, the various applications probably answer to a common feeling, that of "all over," and do not involve a proper process of intellectual assimilation or apprehension of likeness.

Coming to what we should call names, we find that the child will often extend a recognition sign from one object to a second, and to our thinking widely dissimilar, object through a vague feeling of analogy. Such extension, moving rather along poetic lines than those of our logical classification, is apt to wear a quaint metaphorical aspect. A star, for example, looked at, I suppose, as a small bright spot, was called by a child an "eye." Dr. Romanes's child extended the word "star," the first vocable learned after "mamma" and "papa," to bright objects generally—candles, gas, flames, etc. Here we have plainly a rudimentary process of classification. Taine speaks of a child of one year who, after first applying the word "fafer" (from "chemin de fer") to railway engines, went on to transfer it to a steaming coffee-pot and everything that hissed or smoked or made a noise. Any point of likeness, provided it is of sufficient interest to strike the attention, may thus secure the extension of the name.

As with names of things, so with those of actions. The crackling noise of the fire was called by one child "barking," and the barking of a dog was named by another "coughing." We see from this that the particular line of analogical extension followed by a child will depend on the nature of the first impressions or experiences which serve as his starting point.

A like originality is apt to show itself in the first crude attempt to seize and name the relations of things. The child C called dipping bread in gravy, "ba"—bath. Another child extended the word "door" to "everything that stopped up an opening or prevented an exit, including the cork of a bottle and the little table that fastened him in his high chair." The extension of the word "mend" to making and keeping whole or right, which I find to be common among children, is another quaint example of how the child mind first essays to set forth the relations wholeness and its opposite.

In this last instance we see an example of childish concretism, as it has been called—viz., the tendency to make use of a concrete idea in order to express a more abstract idea. Children frequently express the contrast big, little, by the pretty figurative language "mamma" and "baby." Thus a small coin was called by an American child a "baby dollar." Romanes's daughter, named Ilda, pointed out the sheep in a picture as "mamma-ba," and the lambs as "Ilda-ba." It is somewhat the same process when the