The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

than the maize itself. So the American lad playing with a ‘shoe-string bow’ or a ‘corn-stalk fiddle’ would turn to Italy for his inspiration.”

In the interesting lists of popular American plant-names, published by Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen (400), are found the following in which the child is remembered:—

Babies’ breath, Galium Mollugo. In Eastern Massachusetts. Babies’ breath, Muscari botryoides. In Eastern Massachusetts. Babies’ feet, Polygala paucifolia. In New Hampshire. Babies’ slippers, Polygala paucifolia. In Western Massachusetts. Babies’ toes, Polygala paucifolia. In Hubbardston, Mass. Baby blue-eyes, Nemophila insignis. In Sta. Barbara, Cal. Blue-eyed babies, Houstonia coerulea. In Springfield, Mass. Boys and girls, Dicentra cucullaria. In New York. Boys’ love, Artemisia absinthium. In Wellfleet, Mass. Death-baby, Phallus sp. (?). In Salem, Mass. Girls and boys, Dicentra cucullaria. In Vermont. Little boy’s breeches, Dicentra cucullaria. In Central Iowa.

“Blue-eyed babies” is certainly an improvement upon “Quaker ladies,” the name by which the Houstonia is known in some parts of New England; “death-baby” is a term that is given, Mrs. Bergen tells us, “from the fancy that they foretell death in the family near whose house they spring up. I have known of intelligent people rushing out in terror and beating down a colony of these as soon as they appeared in the yard.”

The parents have not been entirely forgotten, as the following names show:—

 

Mother’s beauties, Calandrina Menziesii. In Sta. Barbara, Cal. Mother of thousands, Tradescantia crassifolia (?). In Boston, Mass. Daddy-nuts, Tilia sp. (?). In Madison, Wis.

 

At La Crosse, Wis., the Lonicera talarica, is called “twin sisters,” a name which finds many analogues.

As we have seen, the consideration of children as flowers, plants, trees, traverses many walks of life. Floral imagery has appealed to many primitive peoples, perhaps to none more than to the ancient Mexicans, with whom children were often called flowers, and the Nagualists termed Mother-Earth “the flower that contains everything,” and “the flower that eats everything”—being at once the source and end of life (413. 54).

A sweet old German legend has it that the laughter of little children produced roses, and the sweetest and briefest of the “good-night songs” of the German mothers is this:—

 

“Guten Abend, gute Nacht! Mit Rosen bedacht, Mit Näglein besteckt; Morgen früh, wenn’s Gott will, Wirst du wieder geweckt.”

 

CHAPTER XII.

 

CHILDREN’S ANIMALS, BIRDS, ETC.

My brother, the hare, … my sisters, the doves. —_St. Francis of Assisi._

Love of animals is inborn. The child that has had no pets is to be pitied.—_G. Stanley Hall._

For what are the voices of birds— Aye, and of beasts,—but words, our words, Only so much more sweet?—_Browning._

I know not, little Ella, what the flowers Said to you then, to make your cheek so pale; And why the blackbird in our laurel bowers Spoke to you, only: and the poor pink snail Fear’d less your steps than those of the May-shower It was not strange those creatures loved you so, And told you all. ‘Twas not so long ago You were yourself a bird, or else a flower. —_Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith)._

 

Children and Young Animals.

The comparisons sometimes made of children with various of the lower animals, such as monkeys, bears, pigs, etc., come more naturally to some primitive peoples, who, as Ploss has pointed out, suckle at the breast the young of certain animals simultaneously with their own offspring. In this way, the infant in the Society Islands comes early into association with puppies, as he does also among several of the native tribes of Australia and America; so was it likewise in ancient Rome, and the custom may yet be found among the tent-gypsies of Transylvania, in Persia, and even within the present century has been met with in Naples and Göttingen. The Maori mother, in like manner, suckles young pigs, the Arawak Indian of Guiana young monkeys (as also do the Siamese), the natives of Kamtschatka young bears. An old legend of the city of Breslau has it that the fashion certain ladies have of carrying dogs around with them originated in the fact that Duke Boleslau, in the last quarter of the eleventh century, punished the women of Breslau, for some connubial unfaithfulness, by taking away their suckling children and making them, carry instead puppies at the breast (392. I. 61).

Of the Arekuna of Guiana, Schomburgk tells us:—“They bring up children and monkeys together. The monkeys are members of the family, eat with the other members, are suckled by the women, and have great affection for their human nurses. Oftentimes a woman is to be seen with a child and a monkey at the breast, the two nurselings quarrelling” (529. 13).

The young children of the less nomadic tribes grow up in close association with the few domestic animals possessed by their parents, tumbling about with the puppies on the wigwam-floor or racing with them around the camp-stead.

The history of totemism and fetichism, primitive medicine, and the arts connected therewith, their panaceas, talismans, and amulets, show early association of the child with animals. In the village of Issapoo, on the island of Fernando Po, in Western Africa, there is fastened to a pole in the market-place a snake-skin, to touch which all infants born the preceding year are brought by their mothers during an annual festival (529. 32). In various parts of the world, novices and neophytes are put to dream or fast in seclusion until they see some animal which becomes their tutelary genius, and whose form is often tattooed upon their body.

Sir John Maundeville, the veracious mediaeval chronicler, reported that in Sicily serpents were used to test the legitimacy of children; “if the children be illegitimate, the serpents bite and kill them.” Hartland cites, on the authority of Thiele, “a story in which a wild stallion colt is brought in to smell two babes, one of which is a changeling. Every time he smells one he is quiet and licks it; but, on smelling the other, he is invariably restive and strives to kick it. The latter, therefore, is the changeling” (258. 111).

 

Animal Nurses.

Akin to these practices are many of the forms of exposure and abandonment all over the world. Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale, makes Antigonus say:—

 

“Come on (poor Babe). Some powerful Spirit instruct the Kites and Ravens To be thy Nurses. Wolves and Bears, they say (Casting their savageness aside), have done Like offices of pity.”

 

An old Egyptian painting represents a child and a calf being suckled by the same cow, and in Palestine and the Canary Islands, goats are used to suckle children, especially if the mother of the little one has died (125. II. 393). The story of Psammetichus and the legend of Romulus and Remus find parallels in many lands. Gods, heroes, saints, are suckled and cared for in their infancy by grateful beasts.

 

Wild Children.

Doctor Tylor has discussed at some length the subject of “wild men and beast children” (376), citing examples from many different parts of the globe. Procopius, the chronicler of the Gothic invasion of Italy, states (with the additional information that he saw the child in question himself), that, after the barbarians had ravaged the country, “an infant, left by its mother, was found by a she-goat, which suckled and took care of it. When the survivors came back to their deserted homes, they found the child living with its adopted mother, and called it Aegisthus.” Doctor Tylor calls attention to the prevalence of similar stories in Germany after the destruction and devastation of the Napoleonic wars; there appears to be record of several children wild or animal-reared having, during this period, been received into Count von Recke’s asylum at Overdyke. Many of these tales we need not hesitate to dismiss as purely fabulous, though there may be truth in some of the rest. Among the best-known cases (some of which are evidently nothing more than idiots, or poor wandering children) are: Peter, the “Wild Boy” of Hameln (in 1724); the child reported in the Hessian Chronicle as having been found by some hunters living with wolves in 1341; the child reported by Bernard Connor as living with she-bears, and the child found with bears at Grodno in Poland; the wolf-child of the Ardennes, mentioned by Koenig, in his treatise on the subject; the Irish boy said to feed on grass and hay, found living among the wild sheep; the girl found living wild in Holland in 1717; the two goat-like boys of the Pyrenees (in 1719); the amphibious wild girl of Châlons sur Marne (in 1731); the wild boy of Bamberg, who lowed like an ox; and, the most renowned of all, Kaspar Hauser. This celebrated “wild boy” has recently been made the subject of a monograph by the Duchess of Cleveland (208), of which the first words are these: “The story of Kaspar Hauser is both curious and instructive. It shows on how commonplace and unpromising a foundation a myth of European celebrity may rest.” Sir William Sleeman has something to say of “beast-children” in the Kingdom of Oude (183), and Mr. Ball, who writes of wolf-reared children in India, calls attention to the fact that in that country there seems to have been no instance of a wolf-reared girl (183. 474).

In the Kathâ sarit sâgara (“Ocean of the River of Story”), a work belonging to the twelfth century, there is the story of the immoral union of a yaksha, or jin, and the daughter of a holy man, who was bathing in the Granges. The relatives of the girl by magic changed the two guilty persons into a lion and a lioness. The latter soon died, but gave birth to a human child, which the lion-father made the other lionesses suckle. The baby grew up and became “the world-ruling king, Satavahana” (376. 29). Another Hindu story tells how the daughter of a Brahman, giving birth to a child while on a journey, was forced to leave it in a wood, where it was suckled and nursed by female jackals until rescued by merchants who happened to pass by.

Herodotus repeats the tales that Cyrus was nursed and suckled by a bitch; Zeus figures as suckled by a goat; Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome according to the ancient legend, were nursed by a she-wolf; and others of the heroes and gods of old were suckled by animals whose primitive kinship with the race of man the folk had not forgotten.

Professor Rauber of Dorpat, in his essay on “Homo Sapiens Ferus” (335), discusses in detail sixteen cases of wild children (including most of those treated by Tylor) as follows: the two Hessian wolf-children, boys (1341-1344); the Bamberg boy, who grew up among the cattle (at the close of the sixteenth century); Hans of Liège; the Irish boy brought up by sheep; the three Lithuanian bear-boys (1657, 1669, 1694); the girl of Oranienburg (1717); the two Pyrenæan boys (1719); Peter, the wild boy of Hameln (1724); the girl of Songi in Champagne (1731); the Hungarian bear-girl (1767); the wild man of Cronstadt (end of eighteenth century); the boy of Aveyron (1795). It will be noticed that in this list of sixteen cases but two girls figure.

As a result of his studies Professor Rauber concludes: “What we are wont to call reason does not belong to man as such; in himself he is without it. The appellation Homo sapiens does not then refer to man as such, but to the ability under certain conditions of becoming possessed of reason. It is the same with language and culture of every sort. The title Homo sapiens ferus (Linnæus) is in a strict sense unjustifiable and a contradiction in itself.” To prehistoric man these wild children are like, but they